SOURCE: “Reexamining The Book of Margery Kempe: A Rhetoric of Autobiography,” in Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition, edited by Andrea A. Lunsford, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995, pp. 53-68.

In the following essay, Glenn offers a reading of The Book of Margery Kempe that focuses on the rhetorical strategies Kempe employs in the work. From within the “discourse of Franciscan affective piety,” Glenn maintains, Kempe reveals herself to be a skilled rhetorician who employs “dialogism,” or conversation among the conflicting values and opinions represented by the various personas Kempe creates.

Chaucer's Wife of Bath tells us,

Experience though noon auctoritee Were in this world is right ynough for me To speke of wo that is in mariage. 

Because she was not a churchman, she had no authority to speak of marriage or of womanhood; because she was not a flesh-and-blood woman, she could tap only fictional experience...