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By positing an inverse relationship between the parameters of physical space and the expansiveness of the mind, the twelfth century monk Peter of Celle represents religious enclosure as the site of truly elevated visions. In the process, he represents a spiritual opposition between the confined figure and the pilgrim figure traversing the world. The Life of Christina of Markyate and The Book of Margery Kempe represent the two sides of this opposition: Christina was enclosed for four years before adopting a more relaxed form of religious life, and Margery was a married woman who lived her spiritual life as both mystic and pilgrim within society. I will demonstrate that the spiritual elevation of the confined figure is a concern both of Christina’s biographer, and of Margery. Christina’s biographer validates her mystical experience by emphasising that the conditions of her enclosure are part of a tradition that extends back to the desert fathers. By contrast, Margery and her amanuensis must counter the criticism of her lifestyle, especially during her itinerant periods, by representing her heart, mind, and soul as metaphorical cells, which I will argue can be understood as part of a laicisation of faith.

Peter of Celle wrote several tracts on the contemplative cell including ‘On Affliction and Reading’ (from which the above passage is taken), and ‘The School of the Cloister’. In both of these texts Peter stresses a relationship between the architectural space of the cell and the metaphorical space created by the mind: in ‘On Affliction’, he writes that the cell ‘is a prison for the flesh, a paradise for the mind’;² in ‘The School of the Cloister’ he represents the cell as a construct within which other symbolic spaces are experienced including the cross, a stadium, a courtyard, a treasure room, an earthly sanctuary, a royal bedroom, and the gibbet.³ For example the cell is experienced as the cross because the inhabitant must crucify his whole self with his vices and lusts. The body must be conceived as pinned, motionless like Christ, retaining only the movement of the tongue for prayer. Thus the architectural interior is used as a prompt for the imaginative practice of affective piety within mentally constructed locations, and accordingly becomes a training-ground for spiritual experience. Like Peter’s representation of these spaces, the vocabulary of interiority within this essay will function in a dual fashion, referring both to the physical interior of a building, and of the mind, which, by implication, makes everything outside itself exterior, including architectural confines. This will inform our reading of space in The Life of Christina of Markyate and The Book of Margery Kempe. First, however, I must return to my opening passage from Peter of Celle, which emphasises the superiority of spiritual experience within confined space, to ask: is a religious person held in higher esteem if they are enclosed?

Christina of Markyate was an influential woman, who corrected church leaders, was invited to join the communities at Fontevrault and Marcigny, and turned down an offer by Archbishop Thurston to become Superior of the convent of St. Clement’s in York.⁴ Christina’s Life supports the status she achieved with numerous examples of her spiritual insight and accurate prophecy, and there is little but praise related by her biographer. Where criticism or gossip does briefly emerge, it is phrased neither as specific accusations (apart from the insinuation that her friendship with Geoffrey is not merely platonic) nor is it given expression through the mouth of an identified individual. In one sense this can be interpreted as an act of censorship, minimising any details that may cause the reader to doubt either the veracity of Christina’s visions or the strictness of her form of living. But in another it represents the quality of enclosure that Peter of Celle describes: ‘it does not fear obstructing complaints’. The walls of Christina’s cell form a shield against the world’s criticisms and, further than this, impart a status to the resident that prevents attack. This immunity is termed by the anthropologist Victor Turner the ‘condition of sacred “outsiderhood"’, although it should be acknowledged that the elevation of this isolation is based on an ideal that was not always upheld, for some anchorites had reputations as gossips, while others had problems in avoiding endless callers.⁵

Living within society, Margery does not share this immunity to attack, and criticism plays a significant role in her Book. This is not to say she is without praise, for Margery and her amanuensis take care to chronicle the respect paid to her: the admiration of her visions by such eminent figures as the Bishop of Lincoln and Julian of Norwich; her role of advisor to Lady Westmorland; and the fact that she has a reputation that goes before her (as one that speaks with God) to the Franciscans in Palestine.⁶ But the criticisms appear to have greater endurance, not simply because they continue throughout the Book, but because they reiterate the same accusations. These indictments fall into two categories. First are those doubting the veracity of Margery’s faith and visions, accusing her of heresy, Lollardy, and possession by demons, such as those of the mayor of Leicester, who calls her '"a fals strumpet, a fals Loller, and a fals deceyver of the pepyl"' (3690-1). Second are the criticisms of social non-conformity. While her outrageous public tears provoke most comment, it is the irregularity of her itinerant lifestyle, especially the absence of a husband on these journeys, that arouses the greatest anxiety. People would prefer her to 'go spynne and carde as other women don' (4330-1). Early fifteenth-century English society could not easily accommodate individuals like Margery, who insisted on following Christ whilst in the midst of it, constantly threatening its values.

The freedom of Margery’s itinerant lifestyle is countered by numerous attempts to confine and isolate her from society: the friar who is offended by her crying forces her to go into another church when he is preaching, where she is ‘alone be hirself’ (5083); and her company on the journey to the Holy Land force her to eat alone for six weeks when she goes against their request not speak on the Gospel (ch. 27). More extreme cases of this drive can be found in the imprisonments Margery suffers, the first of which is by the mayor of Leicester.⁷ While this explicitly exhibits a desire to remove a non-conformist element from society, there is also the implication that this would supply Margery with the conditions of anchoritic enclosure. For those who are affronted by her public displays of spirituality, or take Margery’s piety as an implicit judgement on their own behaviour, the opinion appears to be that enclosure is the only acceptable space for such devotion. But the desire to force this upon Margery would defeat the importance of elected confinement, which Peter of Celle in his analogy of the gibbet stresses as the basis of the parallel between the enclosed and Christ who hung with the robbers not because he deserved it but because he chose it.⁸ Whether chosen or assigned, however, the space is the same, which is the ambiguity at the heart of the words of the monk at Canterbury: ‘"I wold thow wer closyd in an hows of ston, that ther shuld no man speke wyth the"’ (870-1). It is impossible to say whether he wants to imprison Margery, or perceives her lifestyle as more befitting to enclosure, but what is certain that Margery is opposed to the cell.

Despite the unambiguous relationship between the cell and prestige, enclosure is not an automatic validation of the veracity of spiritual experience. The status of Christina’s visions and mode of living have been brought into question by the critics Linda Georgianna and Henrietta Leyser because her enclosure is forced by the necessity to flee her family (making it a hiding place more than spiritual retreat), and she does not remain solitary throughout her life (which is a ‘socialization of the solitary ideal’ according to Georgiana).⁹ Conversely, the criticisms endured by Margery are not as problematic for her spiritual standing as they first appear because the exclusion they represent makes them symptomatic of metaphorical outsiderhood:



Just as Peter of Celle posits a relationship between the parameters of physical space and the expansiveness of the mind, so the Book establishes a relationship between the quantity of criticism and the heights of Margery’s spiritual experience.¹⁰ It is apparent that Margery is employing her own alternative validating measures which, as I shall exhibit, turn the notion of enclosure into an external observance by emphasising the inner state of the soul. By contrast, Christina’s biographer supplements the prestige of enclosure by invoking the tradition of the desert fathers in order to endorse the more relaxed form of religious living that she adopts after her enclosure, and to differentiate her from devout laypeople. But the aim of each is the same: to authorize her ‘revelacyons and the forme of her levyng’ (ll.86-7).

Enclosure forms a cusp in Christina’s Life: before, Christina experiences only one vision and one supernatural voice alerting her to the presence of Loric, the young man sent to help her escape from her family; but after, her visions become frequent. The importance of Christina’s confinement to the narrative is also stressed by the detail it is afforded:



Proceeding through this passage, the reader becomes aware that he is being presented with a check-list of trials: heat, cold, thirst, hunger, and physical ailments. Peter of Celle writes that the smaller the space, the more expanded the mind will be, and Christina’s biographer stresses that she inhabited the smallest possible space. The fact that she could not move also presents a similarity with Peter’s notion of the cell as a metaphor for the cross. Christina is being established as part of an ascetic tradition that extends back to the desert fathers. As Samuel Fanous notes, the infestation of toads in her cell, which is sent by Satan to punish her singing, recalls the devils in the forms of lions, bears, asps and scorpions that test St Anthony in his cave.¹¹ Like Christina, the desert fathers rejected the temptations of society in order to battle with the enemy within, for which the cell constituted an arena. Christina’s relation to this tradition is signalled by the set of sexual trials she faces in enclosed spaces.

The spaces of Christina’s trials prior to enclosure are not cells but domestic interiors. The first is a chamber in her aunt’s house where Ralph the Bishop of Durham attempts to seduce her, the second her own bedchamber in which Burthred twice assails her, attempting to consummate their betrothal (pp.42, 50-4). Burthred’s second attempt presents a real threat of rape when he and his entire party enter her chamber, hunting for her. Yet during none of these attacks is Christina subject to sexual temptation, for she is closed to such desire. A true battle with the enemy within does not occur until she is in a cell. Then Christina is visited by the naked cleric, who is filled with lust by the devil. There is no physical combat, but the cell becomes an arena in which she is in iugi conflictu adversus infatigabilem hostem [in constant warring against her tireless adversary] (p.116). Here we can see the dual nature of the cell that Peter of Celle so aptly represents: the physical temptation of the fleshly presence of the priest is coupled with the even greater battle she must wage on her inner desire. Her concern, despite retaining her physical purity, is that her inner purity has been sullied by her lust, which demonstrates how enclosure represents not only an architectural interior, but also a greater concern with the inner state of the individual.

Christina’s biographer aims to represent the four years of her enclosure as a training process that qualifies her as a true visionary. Roger is her teacher: Siquidem doce[bat] illam quedam pene incredibilia de [se]cretis celestibus, et exhibebat se talem [ut] solo corpore videretur in terra. toto vero mente conversari in cello [He taught her things about heavenly secrets which are hardly credible, and acted as if he were on earth only in body, whilst his whole mind was fixed on heaven] (p.104). This presents Christina learning a process of enlarged or elevated thought much like that described by Peter of Celle. Fanous believes that the extremes of ascesis and virtue attributed to Roger are another invocation of the tradition of the desert fathers. By graduating as his student, and, more importantly, inheriting the cell which Roger was allegedly led to by angels, she is bequeathed with a place in a tradition that validates her visionary experiences thereafter. The fact that she did not originally choose this life becomes immaterial.

Christina’s spiritual training finds its climax in two visions where she is described as being physically lifted into the air. On the first occasion she is at prayer, and shedding tears through her longing for heaven, when she is suddenly rapitur ultra nubes usque ad celum [rapt above the clouds even to heaven] to speak with Mary (p.108). Asked what she wants most in the world, Christina looks down on the hermitage and requests it as her abode. This vision addresses both the status of enclosure, and the nature of visions. When Christina claims the hermitage as her dwelling of choice, the place of her enforced confinement becomes a gift from the Virgin, and takes on the requisite prestige. The heavenly setting of the vision is furnished with a sense of corporeal elevation by the word rapitur. It means, literally, to be snatched away or dragged off, but came to be used widely to denote mystic experience.¹² The physicality of the author’s description has two possible explanations. The first is that he did not know how to express a mental flight without describing a physical process, which could be verified by his inability to comprehend a form of spiritual hearing without ears: sed quibus auribus [nescio vox au]ditur divina [but with what ears I know not] (p.132). The second option, which need not be independent of the former, is that he wanted to elevate Christina’s particular visions above those of others. Nevertheless, a correlation is presented between physical enclosure and physically experienced vision.

It seems logical that sensory visions should cease after Christina leaves seclusion, but a second ascent occurs when she is living within her religious community. Praying in the chapel regarding abbot Geoffrey’s illness, Christina asks for a sign discernable to the faculties of sight and hearing. It is granted: after she leaves the chapel she feels herself transduci super conclave [carried over the chamber] of Geoffrey, from which aerial position she can both see him sitting in a corner with his head rested upon a staff, and hear him speaking with those who attend him (p.140). The fact that a phenomenon associated with the conditions of the cell occurs outside the cell suggests that the external rule of physical enclosure has been interiorized. But while this interiorization is represented as the result of a training process in Christina’s Life, Margery is claiming that this frame of mind can be achieved without enclosure.

Margery’s resistance to enclosure is most evident in her period of restless travelling, which takes place between 1413 and 1418.¹³ Her visions are not tied to any one location, occurring in churches, her chamber, processions, at the sites of Christ’s Passion, and places associated with saints. This represents a lifestyle that is the antithesis of enclosure, but this is not to say that Margery was critical of anchoritic living. Indeed as one who visited those in religious enclosure to gain spiritual guidance and show them her visions and way of life, Margery asserts the elevated spirituality and discernment of the anchorite. But her visits also serve a self-validating purpose, for by relaying the praise of one authorized by this way of life, she is sharing in some of their status. For example, the ‘ankyr at the Frer Prechowrys’ reacts to her revelations with ‘gret reverens and wepyng’ because he believes in their authenticity: ‘“ye sowkyn evyn on Crystys brest, and ye han an ernest-peny of hevyn"’ (533-6).¹⁴ This anchorite becomes Margery’s principal confessor. Although this puts him in a position of superiority in their relationship it also establishes that a devout layperson can have an equally valid experience of God.

The Book represents the two methods of attaining mystical experience by relating the two types of visions that Margery has: those during her madness, when she is bound and confined to her chamber; and those she experiences after she has chosen to live a life dedicated to Christ within society. During her madness Margery sees many visions of devils, which manifest themselves physically: ‘pullyng hir and halyng hir’ (205). Christ also appears to her, again physically, sitting on her bed. This presents a relationship, like that presented by Christina’s biographer, between literal confinement and visions experienced through the senses. The subsequent visions, when Margery has been assured of her status in heaven, are mostly experienced inwardly. When she speaks with Christ she records it taking place within her mind, heart, or soul: 'lyftyd up in hir mende be hy swetnesse and devocyon' (5589-90). By implication the visions experienced as an interior phenomenon are deemed superior to those when she was confined because they are validated by a life dedicated to God, rather than an intervention to save her from spiritual torment. Yet by maintaining a concrete example of visions within an enclosed space, Margery does not overthrow the traditional relationship between space and vision. Rather, I propose that Margery is presenting her heart, mind and soul as metaphorical cells.

The metaphorical cell can be found in Margery’s mode of contemplation by turning to the standard pun on cella as a cellar, the store-room of memory.¹⁵ Carruthers describes the nature of memory in the act of contemplation as an expansive concept that recognises the essential roles of emotion, imagination, and cognition within the activity of recollection.¹⁶ This description encapsulates Margery’s lengthy relation of her meditations on the life of Christ, in which she imagines herself physically present, emotionally and even actively involved in the events.¹⁷ During these Margery goes into this interior cellar, and becomes oblivious to her surroundings, as can be seen in her contemplation on the Passion. Margery experiences this vision while in church, and the reader goes with her from this setting into almost three entire chapters of reverie. This vision is interrupted by two lines that reminds the reader that other events are taking place outside the mind of Margery: ‘And than sche wept and cryid passyngly sor, that myche of the pepil in the chirche wondryd on hir body’ (6471-2). By cutting herself off from her social context, this episode suggests a parallel between the withdrawal of an anchorite into the cell, and the withdrawal of Margery into her own mind.

Margery’s heart and soul are represented as internal rooms when Christ says: ‘I sitte in thin hert’; or ‘thu hast bathyd me in thi sowle’ (61740, 7204). Where God resides becomes a chamber to be furnished, as explicitly occurs in chapter 85. Here Christ describes to Margery how she calls upon his mother, saints and holy virgins: ‘to arayn the chawmbre of thi sowle wyth many fayr flowerys and wyth many swete spicus, that I myth restyn therin’ (7092-3). The room is further furnished with three cushions to seat the three persons of the Holy Trinity. By representing an architectural structure within herself, Margery is exhibiting what Beckwith describes as an ‘insistent drive to interiority’.¹⁸ These interior rooms are the metaphorical equivalent of cells, because it is within these that Margery experiences her visions and speaks with God. This not only evokes a validating tradition, but also, I will argue, marks Margery as part of a laicising movement.

A process of laicisation began during the twelfth century. As Watson writes, ‘spiritual perfection came to be thought of as detachable from its professional base in the contemplative life and so available to everyone’.¹⁹ This shift out of a professional context was simultaneously a shift into the metaphorical. An example of this is Richard Rolle’s Emendatio Vitae. Rolle offers the idea of living in poverty as a metaphorical exchange, like buying and selling, of pride for humility.²⁰ Thus the physical manifestations of devotion found in anchoritic living became symbols of the state of mind or spirit they represented, ‘interiorizing interpretations of the external rule’.²¹ This interiorization can be traced in certain architectural allegories, such as The Abbey of the Holy Ghost.²² The tract opens by stating that those unable to enter a professional religious life can still achieve holiness by recreating both the abbey and the religious life within their own consciences. Accordingly the prompt of the cell is no longer needed to meditate on the locations of the cross, stadium, courtyard, and the rest of Peter of Celle’s imagined spaces. Not only does Margery follow this interiorization in describing chambers existing within her heart, soul and mind, but she also marks herself as part of the movement of laicisation itself by representing a parallel process in God’s requirements of her.

Margery’s amanuensis records a series of conversations she had with God in which he abolishes the requirement of outward mechanical observances. In the initial phases of her new mode of living, Margery observes some of the physical rigours of the cell: she fasts and deprives herself of sleep; she does not eat meat; she weeps; she practices 'grett bodyly penawnce', and tames the skin with a hair-shirt (322). But one by one God relaxes these requirements: 'dowtyr, thu hast an hayr upon thi bakke. I wyl thu do it away, and I schal yive the an hayr in thin hert that schal lyke me mych bettyr than alle the hayres in the world' (506-8).²³ This aptly expresses the movement of interiorization: the ‘on’, denoting that which had dressed the external public person, is replaced with ‘in’, so that the ‘hayr’ is at once more intimately experienced by Margery and also hidden from human eyes. The most important waiving of physical requirements concerns virginity. God promises Margery that he will treat her as if she had been a virgin in deed because ‘thu art a mayden in thi sowle (1682).²⁴ Just as the walls of Christina’s cell had shielded her from the criticisms and even physical attacks of those outside, Margery’s body becomes a protective shell, shielding her heart and soul from impurity. In these examples we can see divine sanction not only for Margery’s activities within the Book, but also for other lay figures living religious lives within society.

The internalisation of visionary experience makes explicit the concern that is central to both texts: whether the inner state of the mystic corresponds with the outward performance of spirituality. Christina’s biographer creates a consistent picture in which physical confines and rigours produce physically experienced visions that endure even after her enclosure has ended, which is consistent with Peter of Celle’s representation of the cell as a training ground or physical prompt. The problem presented for Margery is that there is no external proof or training process that validates her claims against attack, especially once God has removed many of the outward observances that signal she is leading a religious life. Yet this removal is the very authorization she claims for her inwardly experienced visions, for they are consistent with the new laicised brand of spirituality. Thus we can posit an inverted version of Christina’s Life: the inner state of purity and devotion produces inwardly experienced visions. But this, like her detractors, we can only take on trust because the walls of Margery’s cell are invisible except to the eyes of God.

Ruth R. Roberts, U. of Cambridge

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NOTES

1. Peter of Celle, ‘On Affliction and Reading’, in Selected Works, tr. Hugh Feiss (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1987), p.139.

2.Selected Works, p.140.

3.Selected Works, pp.81-93.

4.The Life of Christina of Markyate, ed. and tr. C.H. Talbot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p.126. Further references to this edition are given by page number within the text.

5.Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), p.103.

6.The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Barry Windeatt (Harlow: Longman, 2000), ll.1344-50, 1066-72, 4474-85, 2388-97. Further references to this edition are given by line number within the text.

7. After this episode she is re-imprisoned by the Styward of Leicester (3743-4); threatened with incarceration in York and Hull (4073-9, 4304-5); arrested and imprisoned before she crosses the Humber (ch.53-4); imprisoned again after she has crossed (4538-43); and she and her husband escape imprisonment outside Ely (4591-9).

8.Selected Works, p.93

9.Linda Georgianna, The Solitary Self: Individuality in the Ancrene Wisse (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp.37-9; Henrietta Leyser in the Introduction to Christiana of Markyate: A Twelfth Century Holy Woman, ed. Samuel Fanous and Henrietta Leyser (London: Routledge, 2005), p.6.

10.See Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: identity, culture, and society in late medieval writings (London: Routledge, 1993), pp.80-3 for discussion of this criticism as a form of imitatio Christi.

11.Samuel Fanous, ‘Christina and the Double Crown’, in Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth Century Holy Woman, pp.53-78 (p.65).

12.Pocket Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. James Morwood, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p.158.

13.See Anthony Goodman, Margery Kempe and her World (Harlow: Longman, 2002), pp.127-203 for discussion of her English travels and pilgrimages abroad.

14.Other anchorites she visits include ‘Wyllyam Southfeld, a good man and an holy levar’ (1297-1331); Dame Julian of Norwich (1335-81); the anchorite at the Chapel of the Field (3389-3416); the anchoress in York (3957-64); and on one occasion Master Alan is referred to as an ‘ankyr’ (5667).

15.Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p.112.

16.Carruthers, p.2.

17.The births of the Virgin Mary, St John the Baptist, and Christ (545-589); the Adoration of the Magi and flight into Egypt (590-600); Christ taking leave of his mother and Mary Magdalene, Christ’s Ascension, and death of the Virgin (5851-5904); the Passion (6285-6665).

18.Beckwith, p.91.

19.Nicholas Watson, ‘Ancrene Wisse, Religious Reform and the Late Middle Ages’, in A Companion to Ancrene Wisse, ed. Yoko Wada (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003), pp.197-226 (p.209).

20.Richard Rolle, Emendatio vitae; Orationes ad honorem nominis Ihesu, ed. Nicolas Watson (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies 1995), p.39.

21.Christiania Whitehead, ‘Making a cloister of the soul in medieval religious treatises’, Medium Aevum, 67 (1998), 1-29 (p.17).

22.See Whitehead.

23.The requirement to fast is relaxed (770-4, 2924-34, 5438-43); foregoing meat (5417-26); and tears (5222-4).

24.See Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001), pp.166-241 for discussion on the re-making of Margery’s virginity.

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