It is striking, then, that this is the only chapter in the Book in which she is fully named as ‘Mar. 415) – and through these gossiping Londoners in the city streets, at dinner, and in church, Margery Kempe comes face to face with her own image, encountering and refashioning herself in an effort to reclaim her identity in an environment in which she has been reduced to an amusing and entertaining figure of mythology. She is frequently confronted by such reproof – in ‘many tymys and in many placys had gret repref therby’ (p. In the private feasting room, where she is paradoxically less conspicuous, she boldly stands up and identifies herself: ‘I am that same persone to whom thes wordys ben arectyd ’, and lays claim to the person, but not the persona. Curiously, her identity is not recognised here as it had been on the public street, emphasising further the kind of powerful symbol of that she has become through a type of auto-mimesis, as she is known widely for her abstruse reputation.
She becomes a byword and a laughing-stock – an embodied myth – as the proverb continues to circulate as it had before, ventriloquising her reported utterances. This rumoured hypocrisy is based on the false – and, according to Kempe, diabolic – story that she had refused to eat plain herring in favour of fine pike, and rebounds at her again during an event that we have termed Pike Gate in homage to its own infamy in Margery Kempe At a feast at the house of a ‘worschepful woman’ she becomes a victim of mythological construction, quite literally encountering her own public reputation as it is in the process of being made.
However unexpected this choice of evasive the covering is ineffective and she is recognised nevertheless, a scandalous ‘maner of proverbe’ reverberating against her through cries on the street of ‘A, thu fals flesch, thu schalt no good mete etyn!’ (p. Her notoriety a given, she divulges that many Londoners ‘knew hir wel anow’, and so she dons a veil as a disguise in order that she might ‘gon unknowyn’ for the time being.
Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe in the twenty-first centuryĪ flashback to the proud merchant woman, dressed in ‘pompows aray’, of Margery Kempe's younger years interrupts the moment of her entry into the city of London in Chapter Book II, of The Book of Margery Aged sixty-one and recently returned to England after an arduous pilgrimage to northern Europe, Kempe is clad in a coarse sackcloth and in need of a loan.
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