Fear Not the Language of the World: Red Reading Literacy in The Book of Margery Kempe

Abstract

My doctoral project, “Fear Not the Language of the World: Red Reading Literacy in The Book of Margery Kempe,” integrates Métis, Mi’kmaq, Cherokee, Coast Salish, and Nisga’a teachings with Western scholarship on story, orality, and literacy to perform an analysis of The Book in conversation with other late medieval mystical works, such as Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love and Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ. My project’s overarching method engages with etuaptmumk, or Mi’kmaq two-eyed seeing, to provide a more holistic reading of Margery Kempe grounded in non-colonial, non-binary approaches to orality and literacy. Etuaptmumk, developed by Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall, is a reconciled method that integrates Western academic systems with Indigenous ways of knowing. Using these approaches, I argue that scholarly analysis of The Book has consistently reproduced a Western colonial approach which privileges literacy, trying to analyze whether Kempe functions primarily as an oral thinker or a literate thinker. An Indigenous approach, by contrast, allows us to see that she is both and neither. I argue that The Book is best described as a work of interfusional literature, which is a term for a genre style, coined by Cherokee author Thomas King, for the integration of written and oral traditions in order to preserve the voice, gestures, and personality of the storyteller on the page. Interfusional literatures attempt to preserve the performative on the otherwise static page. Her work engages with and merges the oral and literate as integral and inseparable parts of the whole. Kempe incorporates the storyteller, the embodied and affective responses to texts, and varied reading approaches from the oral to the silent. I argue for an approach that provides a well-rounded understanding of her work: one that imagines her work as not only evidence of or sitting within the interdependent spectrum of orality and textuality, but one that plays with, re-imagines, and in a sense re-invents the text.