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Capgrave is a strong contender for the identity of the
scribe of The Book of Margery Kempe
– he is a well-known Middle English author familiar with the sources Margery
uses, he is active in Lynn at the
same time Margery was writing, and his Life
of Saint Katherine shows a high degree of narrative similarity with
events in Margery’s Book. Anthony Goodman (1978) has previously
connected Margery with Capgrave’s work, especially the Life of Saint
Katherine; Karen Winstead has also written on the connections between the
two. Identifying Capgrave as Margery’s
scribe is of course not unproblematic, but even if Capgrave cannot be
conclusively shown to have had any direct contact with Margery, his works and
the social/intellectual contexts he provides still give valuable evidence in
identifying the circumstances that Margery, a devotionally-inclined, wealthy
middle-class wife and widow, would have faced in attempting to have her book
written.
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Capgrave as
Margery’s Scribe?
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The positive evidence, though all circumstantial, provides
a compelling case for considering Capgrave as the scribe behind the Book of Margery Kempe. This evidence is as follows (see Fredeman,
Winstead, and Smetana for Capgrave bibliographical information; see Meech and
Allen for bibliographical information on Margery):
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- Capgrave
is known to have been an active writer stationed in Lynn
by 1437 (Margery’s book was written between 1436-1438).
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- His Life of Saint Katherine shares
many narrative similarities with the Book
of Margery Kempe, including plot events such as the mystical
marriage, and recurring motifs such as the “evil written” exemplar and
disputations with religious officials.
The mystical marriage presented in the Life of Saint Katherine is particularly intriguing, as it
shares with Margery’s experience the use of a large amount of
contemporary marital language and practical ritual elements: God and his
bride say wedding vows, clasp hands, and have witnesses, much as other
late-medieval English marrying couples would have done. Catherine of Siena, on the other hand,
experiences a much more mystical union, involving an actual exchange of
hearts between her and God. The
wide variety of experiences that a mystical marriage could entail for
medieval catholic visionaries seems to underscore a type of influence
between Margery’s writing and the Life
of Saint Katherine.
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- Capgrave
also states, in the introduction to his Life of Saint Augustine, that he wrote it at the request of “a
gentle woman” who wanted a vernacular vita of Augustine (a saint that
Margery includes in her prayers in the end of her Book, though not earlier; see below) because she had been
born during his feast. Although
candidates other than Margery have been brought forward for this “gentle
woman,” it nevertheless shows that upper-class women could rather easily
employ a literate religious, especially an Augustinian, for the purposes
of composing, and, one would suspect, writing down copies of works (see
also Religious Orders, under Augustinians).
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- The
priest-scribe of the Book of
Margery Kempe, when referring to himself in the text, often
identifies himself as “the priest which afterwards wrote this book,” a
phrase echoed very closely in places in Capgrave’s writing, such as the
entry for the year 1393 in his Chronicle of England: “in this year…was
that friar born which made these annotations” (EETS Katherine, intro).
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- Margery
herself seems to have had a good relationship with the Augustinians in Lynn,
although she does not mention them until late in the Book. The Augustinian Friar in chapter
sixty-eight marks the order’s first appearance, and he is acting as one
of Margery’s public defenders against her Franciscan detractor.
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- In
her prayers at the end of her Book,
Margery includes several of her “personal” saints as well as others for
whom she has not shown a previous interest. One of these newer saints is “Seynt
Awstyn,” listed alongside “Mary Mawdelyn…Mary Egipcyan…[and]
Seynt Powle” as the saints for which Margery especially thanks God. “Seynt Awstyn” could be ambiguous in
referring to either Augustine of Canterbury or Augustine of Hippo, but
Margery’s own pantheon of saints, here and elsewhere, consists largely of
penitent saints, of which Augustine of Hippo is a prime example as
portrayed in his Confessiones. The Augustinians of Lynn could have
served as a convenient source of information for Margery about this
saint.
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Problems with
Capgrave as Margery’s Scribe
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There are two main problems with identifying Capgrave as
Margery’s scribe. The first is that,
despite the similarity noted above between the Margery’s scribe’s
and Capgrave’s self-identifications, Capgrave calls himself a friar whereas
Margery’s scribe calls himself a priest.
The terms were certainly not synonymous; however, a possible
explanation for this discrepancy lies in the opening to the preface of
Capgrave’s Abbreviation of Chronicles,
where he says that he, a “pore frere…sendith
prayer, obediens, subjeccion, and all that euir be ony deute a prest schuld offir onto his kyng” (ed.
Lucas, p. 7; emphasis added). Thus, in
some way, the offices of priest and friar were equivalent for Capgrave, who
was himself both a priest and a friar (Capgrave’s priesthood was actually his
more recent office – conventional dates place his admission to the
Augustinian order in 1410 while his ordination occurred in 1417).
A second and perhaps more difficult issue is that the
priest-scribe of the Book of Margery
Kempe places himself in Lynn c. 1420, when Margery was preached against
and abandoned by many of her supporters; this occurs in chapter sixty-two of
Margery’s Book. At that time, Capgrave was probably engaged
in his university studies in London. But owing to the political and
administrative networking that he surely participated in as an Augustinian,
it is possible that Capgrave would have made brief sojourns back to Lynn
for official business. It would be
difficult to date the scribe-priest’s abandonment of Margery earlier than
1420; Hope Emily Allen, in her note to chapter sixty-one, dates the arrival
of Margery’s Franciscan rival after the death of Richard Caister, Vicar of
St. Stephen’s, whose grave Margery weeps at in chapter sixty; chapter
sixty-one then begins, “Than cam
þer a frer to Lenne…” (emphasis added), implying
chronological continuity. Despite the
paucity of information currently available on Capgrave’s locations during his
university activities, finding a way to locate him in Lynn
at the time of Margery’s denunciation by the Franciscan preacher would have
to be a prime task of those wishing to identify Capgrave as Margery’s scribe.
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Despite these problems, even if Capgrave cannot be
certainly identified as Margery’s scribe, his presence in Lynn
and his work as an author provide a valuable context for Margery’s employment
of a priest to write down her Book. Capgrave shows that the practice of
patronage of religious figures was not necessarily unusual, either for the
friars or for the women employing them.
Margery’s late association with an Augustinian, either Capgrave or
another individual, would explain her inclusion of St.
Augustine (likely of Hippo) only at the end of her
book as a personal saint. She does
not, it must be pointed out, include Saints Dominic or Francis in that
category, nor the prophet Elijah, an adopted founder and “patron saint” of
sorts for the Carmelites. After all,
Capgrave and Margery surely must have been aware of each other – they were
both active at the same time, and both were very public figures associated
with religious practice in a town with a population that did not exceed 5,000
people.
For more information on Margery’s possible associations
with the Augustinians, see the Religious
Orders in Lynn page on this site.
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Back
Home
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Bibliography
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Editions of works
by Capgrave and Margery
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Horstmann,
Carl, ed. The Life of St. Katherine of Alexandria.
EETS no. 100. London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, Trübner & Co., 1893.
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Lucas,
Peter J., ed. John Capgrave’s
Abbreuiacioin of Cronicles. EETS no. 285. Oxford
University Press, 1983.
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Meech, Sanford
Brown, and Allen, Hope Emily, eds. The Book of Margery Kempe. EETS no.
212. Oxford University
Press, 1940.
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Smetana,
Cyril Lawrence, ed. Life of Saint Augustine.
Toronto: Pontifical Institute of
Medieval Studies, 2001.
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Winstead,
Karen A., ed. The Life of Saint
Katherine. Kalamazoo:
Medieval Institute Publications, 1999.
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Secondary materials
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Beadle,
Richard. “Prolegomena to a Literary Geography of Later Medieval Norfolk.”
Regionalism in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts: Essays Celebrating the
Publication of “A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English.” Ed. Felicity
Riddy. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer,
1991. 89-108.
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Colledge,
Edmund. “John Capgrave's Literary Vocation.” Analecta Augustiniana 40
(1977): 187-95.
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De
Meijer, Alberic. “John Capgrave, O.E.S.A.” Augustiniana 5 (1955):
400-40 and Augustiniana 7 (1957): 118-48, 531-75.
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Fredeman,
Jane. “The Life of John Capgrave, O.E.S.A. (1393-1464).” Augustiniana
29 (1979): 197-237.
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Goodman,
Anthony. Margery Kempe and Her World. London:
Longman, 2002.
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---. “The
Piety of John Brunham’s Daughter, of Lynn.”
Medieval Women. Ed. Derek Baker. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1978. 347-58.
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Lucas,
Peter J. “John Capgrave, O.S.A. (1393-1464), Scribe and ‘Publisher.’” Transactions
of the Cambridge
Bibliographical Society 5 (1969): 1-35.
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---.
“John Capgrave, Friar of Lynn.” The
Historian 44 (1994): 23-24.
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---. From
Author to Audience: John Capgrave and Medieval Publication. Dublin:
University College
Dublin Press, 1997.
Seymour, M.
C. “The Manuscripts of John Capgrave’s English Works.” Scriptorium 40 (1986): 248-55.
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Winstead,
Karen. John
Capgrave and Margery Kempe. Mapping Margery Kempe.
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