by Stacie Vos
Stacie Vos’s provocative meditation on reading Margery Kempe’s Book in a community college classroom does not explicitly deal with the challenges and victories ushered in by our post2019 environment; nevertheless, in the past six months, the student struggles documented by Vos have become more visible throughout higher education. Her essay challenges us to remember that our seemingly arcane knowledge can be a potent resource for our students, no matter their background or prior experience.
Vos, a Ph.D. candidate in Literature at the University of California San Diego, prefaces her account of teaching at Housatonic Community College with a vignette of taking afternoon tea at Yale’s Elizabethan Club, an endowed, invitation-only private club noted for its vault of rare, early-modern books that include a Shakespeare folio. The bubble of privilege enclosing the Lizzie provides a sharp contrast to the nearby community college, simultaneously situated adjacent to the state’s prosperous Gold Coast and within Bridgeport, a city in sharp economic decline.
What I remember most clearly about my visit to the Elizabethan or "Lizzie" Club in 2013 are the teacups. I remember that there was a vault with valuable objects associated with William Shakespeare. But it was, of course, the experience of being taken in, and not these objects themselves, that occupied my eager thoughts that day.
Reflecting during recent weeks on how discussions about education and access relate specifically to Medieval Studies, I began to wonder if the field has not come to be seen as the Lizzie Club of academia, an enchanted and vaulted realm to which only a few gain entry, "by invitation only."
At the same time that I visited the Lizzie Club, I was teaching during the evenings at Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, Connecticut. I taught remedial reading courses and courses in Literature and Composition. For several semesters, I taught the Book of Margery Kempe in English 102. I was aware that this was a strange choice: none of my HCC colleagues taught medieval literature, and none of my medievalist colleagues or professors taught community college writing.
Precisely because this book is so strange, it lends itself to introductory lessons in how to read a text critically. Always we must ask, when reading the Book, who is writing, and why? Who is speaking, and to whom? Who can read? How are texts produced? What is the structure of the narrative, and how does this structure reflect its theological offerings?
Near the end of the fall semester of 2014, I asked students to take turns presenting one chapter from the Book. The assignment was quite simple, calling for a summary of the chapter’s main events and a discussion of its key terms.
The last of the presentations, done by a student who worked as a nurse during the day, has stood out in my mind ever since. Instead of summarizing the text, Ms. Sheffey paraphrased it, beginning to translate the work into her own idiom. This was the Book of Margery Kempe in an entirely new key.
Sheffey's rendering of Chapter 79, a Passion vision, included the following conversions: "it is my father's will that it be so" became "…he had to be about his father's business"; "... he blessed his mother and his mother him" became "the vice versa of how they blessed each other"; "'I would far rather that you would slay me'" became "...what I've seen, I'd rather be me and not nobody else. Let me take the burden." Sheffey’s personalized “I’d rather be me” anticipated the line she would translate (with the help of Lynn Staley’s footnotes in the Norton Critical Edition) a moment later: “Ego sum.”
Her pacing, eye contact, and tone helped to emphasize particular lines and exposed her own interest in aspects of the text, such as the line in which Jesus describes Mary as a queen and promises her that he shall give her "power over the devils so that they shall be afraid of [her] and [her] not of them" (137-139).
Not only did Sheffey use her own vocabulary to explain the significance of the events of the chapter, she also used her whole body to transmit the contents of her chosen chapter. She delivered a presentation (that genre of assignment often sure to bore many students in the room) with a rhythm and charge that struck every person that dark November evening.
While Sheffey took care to explain when the speaker shifted, it is remarkable to me to see, as I transcribe the recording of her speech, the ways in which she allowed her own voice to enter into the text.
Sheffey's engagement with this work was unlike any I have seen since I began in 2006 as a high school English teacher just one mile away from the Lizzie Club. She did not stumble over the lines as I often see students do with Spenser or Shakespeare. While Sheffey felt free to make the Book her own, students very rarely feel so free to write anew great works of English poetry.
What is it about the Book that could make way for such engagement? Is it the Middle English prose? Is it the Book's insistence upon an illiterate author? Is it the story of an outsider who has to find her own way? Is it the way the text invites someone who does not speak Latin, and who is not Jesus Christ, to nevertheless declare, "Ego sum"?
There is something about Margery. This book is the only one I've taught that has inspired such strong reactions as Ms. Sheffey's, and a range of others. One student threatened to drop my course because she felt that she wasn't religious enough to relate to the Book (it became her favorite text once she realized that Margery had an independence from her husband and family that she, a working mother and night student, craved). Another wrote a moving autobiographical piece in the style of the Book about the young men who bullied him on the way to school in Queens.
While medieval manuscript studies may seem to have no place in the introductory writing course, especially in a city with such vast educational inequalities as Bridgeport, I have found that the students with whom I work gain a new confidence before these texts, which are new to everyone. Paradoxically, reading Middle English has an equalizing effect, as all students, regardless of educational background, find themselves at a loss before the Book at first.
Together, we begin to understand it.
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