SOURCE: “Conclusion: Fictions of Community,” in Margery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994, pp. 171-99.

In the following essay, Staley analyzes the episodic structure of The Book of Margery Kempe and Kempe's “sophisticated” choice of words, which works to both communicate and obfuscate meaning.

If The Book of Margery Kempe is a fiction, which I believe it to be, it is a fiction that attempts to create a social reality and to examine that reality in relation to a single individual. By situating Margery squarely within the topography, social structures, and ideological conflicts of England during the first third of the fifteenth century, Kempe avoids both the limitations of the jeremiad and the possible penalties incurred by its author. The Book of Margery Kempe bears eloquent testimony to Kempe's ability to employ the conventions of her day in ways that allow her to assess the foundations...