Margery Kempe

closely into people’s views of what is traditional when it comes to this; so it is no surprise that we find this very theme incorporated into her book The Book of Margery Kempe. In this book we see a woman’s journey on the road of religious fulfillment and her struggles with marriage and trying to adhere to the rules of her religion. Margery is trying to stay faithful to God but still trying to live through and ignore her desires (as well as her ‘responsibilities’) as a wife. This struggle is…

In medieval works such as Le Morte Darthur, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and The Book of Margery Kempe, it is clear that the social restrains represented in the literatures that were imposed on women had undergone a drastic change through time. Since Grendel offers an alternative view on the epic poem of Beowulf by narrating through the eyes of the “monster”, its portrayal of women’s role in society should be a reflection of the social system during the middle age. During the early…

“The non-nobles of medieval Europe were powerless, impoverished (culturally and/or economically), and miserable” is a common misconception on the Middle Ages. Indeed, since the stories and sources we got are often from the nobility, about it and written for it. Moreover, in general, there is no that much materials and records about peasants, since most of them were iliterate and lived in perishable houses. That does not necessarily mean that the non-nobles were completely absent, but they are…

The Tale reveals that the perfectly good woman is powerful, or at least potentially so, insofar as her suffering and submission are fundamentally insubordinate and deeply threatening to men and to the concepts of power and gender identify upon which patriarchal culture is premised (Hansen, 190.) However, the happy ending brings the heroine the dubious reward of permanent union with a man whom the Clerk, embellishing his sources, has characterized as a sadistic tyrant, worst of men and cruelest…