Sexual desire for Christ: A Look at The Book of Margery Kempe I

I first encountered The Book of Margery Kempe in my second semester of Medieval Studies and, like most people, I didn’t really understand what I was looking at. There was mostly a whole lot of crying and weeping going on, a lot of begging and a lot of hysterics. Who is this woman and why do I have to read this text?

A controversial figure in her own lifetime for many different reasons, her writing (can we even call it her writing? That’s where the issues start.) continues to polarize. Most students, I’ve found, are mainly confused and annoyed by her.

But right from the start, this alienation that Margery Kempe evokes fascinated me. When she describes her intense bodily reactions to her spiritual encounters with Christ, when she cries and laments, when all she thinks about is God and how she can grow even closer to him, she is never really “relatable”, but what many perceive as annoyance, as hysteria, as overblown emotionality, also resonated very deeply with me – as somebody who starts crying at the tiniest problem.

The other thing that I couldn’t let go off while engaging with her Book was the profound sense of loneliness, of isolation within a community that wants to reject you. Margery is an outsider, often scared and even helpless. Her connection to Christ gives her spiritual power and authority, but it also drives her away from others. Suddenly, I had found an approach to her that I was comfortable with, one that felt complex yet deeply personal. But then life moved on and I didn’t think about her again once those sessions of the Basic Module were over.

About a year later, when I took a seminar on Middle English mystics, I had the chance to immerse myself in Margery and her Book again, and even decided to write a term paper about her. The topic? Her expressions of sexual desire for Christ and how it helps her construct authority, both spiritual and sexual.

I’ll admit, sex and desire aren’t always the first topics that come to mind in an academic setting, but they are a fundamental part of human life and, to me, the most fascinating aspects of mysticism. Mystics often use erotic language, sexual metaphors, the body as a tool for the indescribable parts of spirituality, of a deep union with God. With Margery, however, there is so much more at play here. She is a wife and a mother, an inherently sexually active woman, and so her desire for a sexual relationship with Christ has clear parallels with the real world around her.

Some of her visions read almost like a modern romance novel: Christ tells her about his (admittedly rather tame) fantasies to touch her, to kiss her, to unite their bodies as wife and husband, and she even imagines a marriage ceremony. There is so much more than “just” a bodily connection here, Margery seems to express genuine romantic love for Christ, as well as the desire for a physical union, for sex.

And again, this resonated with me because it felt so real, so full of complicated and confusing emotions, full of anxieties and desires.

I firmly believe that in any given topic, almost everyone can find something they’re interested in, even if it takes a little longer – like it did for me. And so I found what I cared a whole lot about: thinking about sex in the context of her Book has given me a million new ways of looking at and understanding Margery Kempe, this controversial yet loveable creature.

References:

Text: The Book of Margery Kempe (Annotated Edition), ed. by Barry Windeatt (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004)