SOURCE: “Cobham's Daughter: The Book of Margery Kempe and the Power of Heterodox Thinking,” in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 3, September, 1995, pp. 277-304.

In the following essay, Shklar investigates the issue of Kempe's religious dissent, as it is revealed in The Book of Margery Kempe. Shklar explains that the Lollards—a sect of religious reformers under the leadership of John Wycliffe—offered a framework of discourse from which Kempe developed her own methods of dissent and sense of “vernacular spirituality.”

For the most part, critics have approached the problem of dissent in The Book of Margery Kempe as something curiously external to its author's purpose. Either they accept Kempe's orthodoxy at face value, reading the accusations of heresy made against her as doctrinally unjustifiable, or they interpret Kempe's behavior as approaching Wycliffite ideology in certain respects, particularly her insistence on preaching publicly despite being a secular woman.¹ The...