The inexpressible self: biblical autobiography in the poetry of Walter of Wimborne and The Book of Margery Kempe

This thesis begins with a standard element in the rhetorical apparatus of the Latin Middle Ages, put to exceptional use in a new devotional setting. It ends with the work of one of the period's notoriously outlandish figures, who has recently achieved a popular status, thanks to the “New Medievalism” informed by feminism, especially in its post-structuralist phase. I argue that both these characters use the cluster of topoi known as Inexpressibility—Affected Modesty, Inexpressibility, and Impossibility—and related figures, to redesign conventional relationships in the biblical narrative in a way that fits their own life stories, producing a phenomenon I call “biblical autobiography.” The Anglo-Latin writings of the thirteenth-century Franciscan, Walter of Wimborne, are an extraordinary record of one man's experience of the social and spiritual revolution heralded by the arrival in England of the Franciscans. Walter began his writing career as a classicizing satirist and ended it as a devoted servant of the Virgin. As both satirist and contemplative, Walter's single most persistent theme is language, its possibilities and limitations and its relationship to truth. Walter emphasizes language thematically—the word as an alternative to the false exchange of money yet itself susceptible to the corruptions of flattery and deceit; the word as related to the divine Word but inadequate to the task of linking the human to the divine. He also emphasizes it stylistically with rhythm, rhyme, repetition and trope. Struggling to make the transition from classical satire to Christian devotion without relinquishing the advantages of the satirical mode, Walter extends Inexpressibility beyond its conventional use in an attempt to retell the biblical narrative as a story of personal revenge and redress. The final analysis of Walter's long narrative poem Marie Carmina requires a preliminary study of how Walter shifts from classical satire to pious meditation, and from “objective” hymnody to the new “subjective” hymnody of affective devotion. The terms objective and subjective are examined in the process and a vocabulary introduced that allows for the complexity of the relationship Walter constructs between internal necessity and external reality. The theories of Julia Kristeva, Paul Ricoeur, and Mikhail Bakhtin help to make the argument that Walter's poetry resists the ready-made resolution of immanent transcendence supplied by the Christian liturgy to accommodate his own personal narrative of memory and longing. The final chapter moves ahead a century and a half to a writer whose resemblance to Walter is primarily temperamental. Like Walter in his poems, in The Book of Margery Kempe, Margery clings obsessively to the subject of self. Walter makes insistent use of Affected Modesty and Inexpressibility; Margery weeps and sobs. It is the narrative of weather, however, that is the focus of this chapter. In his attempts to infiltrate the Christian narrative with personal affect, Walter rages against unresponsive weather, Margery uses weather to link her story to the divine will. The Bible, The Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius, and Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon provide models for an examination of Margery's peculiar blend of attitudes to weather in her Book and how, particularly in the second part of her book, she uses medieval literary conventions of weather to negotiate agency. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)