1 - Universalizing correction as a moral practice

Summary

When the Margery Kempe constructed by her Book is cast out of the Archbishop of York's presence and then his archdiocese, one of her prime offenses has been practicing fraternal correction of sin. In late 1417, she has been reproving York clerics and lay people for their sins, urging them to amend their lives. In doing so, she is what Meili Steele calls, in familiar poststructuralist terms, “a constructed subject.” Just as the Book constructs her as an exemplary holy woman in general, the clerics who have catechized her and counseled her over the years have shaped her into an active participant in their program of pastoral care, designed for two centuries to “inspire correct belief and correct behavior,” especially to extirpate sin. The sins she rebukes are clerically designated and defined, and the most common of them, blasphemy, was rated the gravest among all Sins of the Tongue, a violation of the Ten Commandments, certain to bring damnation (as she reminds the culprits) unless repented of and abandoned. Moreover, the rhetoric Kempe employs in rebuking sin hews, as we shall see at the other end of this book, to norms laid out in pastoral texts. One of the reasons she escapes the nets cast by her learned accusers is that she is so fully a subject of clerical power, so fully conformed to pastoral discourse on sin and its correction.