What could an illiterate mystic from the fifteenth century possibly have to teach us about sex, marriage, and consent?
Rather a lot, it turns out. Viewed with suspicion by her contemporaries after her death, Margery Kempe fell into obscurity for five hundred years, and the memory of her life and work were very nearly lost to the sands of time. Then, in the 1930s, a mysterious manuscript was discovered in an English country house. The manuscript turned out to be an autobiography, and it was published in 1936 as The Book of Margery Kempe.
Margery is a rather unusual character—even for a mystic. All we know about her life is found in the book which, not being able to read or write, she dictated to two scribes. She started several businesses, all of which failed. After a very difficult first pregnancy, she developed what would now be described as postpartum psychosis, almost taking her own life. Still, she bore her husband fourteen children before persuading him to enter a vow of celibacy for the remainder of their marriage. She was repeatedly accused of heresy in her time but was always found to be an orthodox Christian when interrogated by church authorities. During the course of her many pilgrimages, including one to Jerusalem, she wept so much from the intensity of her love for God that her fellow pilgrims, exasperated, abandoned her in Venice.
Margery is much less well known than her contemporary Julian of Norwich, whom she recounts going to meet during one of her pilgrimages. While she made a vow of celibacy like many other female saints, she remains uncanonized in the Catholic Church, and she doesn’t enjoy the same notoriety as the early church saints who inspired her. She’s a shadowy yet fascinating figure, whose Book is often described as the first autobiography written in the English language. Part hagiography, part meditation on her visions, the text is as hard to put in a box as Margery herself.
There is much that Margery can offer the contemporary reader. Where we may, perhaps, have the most to learn from her is in her attitude towards sexuality. Her request to her husband for a celibate marriage in later life may leave us feeling puzzled. However alien her story must now seem to us, it can challenge us to question our contemporary assumptions about sex and marriage.
Margery is Confronted with the Marital Debt
Margery seems to have been fond of her husband. She married him at twenty, had fourteen children by him, and looked after him in his old age. After they made their mutual vow of celibacy in middle age, she travelled extensively without him (one of the reasons she caused suspicion and was arrested), and they spent long periods apart. And yet, when her husband was ill, “she took [him] home with her and looked after him for years afterwards.” He seems to have suffered from what we would now call dementia, and nursing him was hard, but she “served him and helped him, she thought, as she would have done Christ himself.” Their relationship seems to have been characterized by not only a sense of duty, but genuine affection and love.
Notwithstanding their affection for one another, Margery did become firm in her wish for abstinence for the remainder of their marriage. After one of her powerful mystical experiences, she no longer “had any desire to have sexual intercourse with her husband, for paying the debt of matrimony was so abominable to her.” Yet she also accepted the church teaching on the “marital debt,” as it was understood at that time. Based on a particular interpretation of St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, the Catholic Church taught that spouses should not deny sex to one another except through mutual agreement. Margery obeyed this teaching “with much weeping and sorrowing.”
Margery tells us that she wanted to become celibate because she had realized, through her mystical vision of Christ, that the love she and her husband had for each other was “inordinate.” It may sound unusual to our ears, but in her culture, the concept that a couple might engage in intercourse in an unchaste way, even if they were lawfully married, was not at all unusual. St. Augustine’s idea that spouses would do well to abstain from sex in the later part of their marriage to focus on growing closer to God, for instance, was still influential.
And yet, one can’t help but wonder if Margery’s personal experience of childbirth may have also contributed to her aversion to sexual intimacy. She describes having intense sickness in her first pregnancy—likely what would now be diagnosed as hyperemesis gravidarum—and such intense postpartum depression that “she bit her own hand so violently that the mark could be seen for the rest of her life,” “pitilessly tore the skin on her body,” and “would have killed herself many a time” if she had not been restrained by her family. If she was even a fraction as mentally and physically ill for the other thirteen pregnancies, it is perhaps not altogether surprising that Margery would finally request a commitment to celibacy.
Whatever combination of reasons led to her request, we do know three things: that she did not relent until her husband agreed to living celibately; that she continued to pay the “marital debt” until they made their vow by “mutual consent”; and that she continued to love her husband until his death. In Margery’s medieval mind, there is nothing contradictory about these three facts. When she dictates to her scribe that she waited patiently for her husband to be of one mind with her, she is doing so on the strength of a tradition of celibate marriages before her, many of which she explicitly cites.
Rediscovering Chastity
Although the words are often confused with one another, in the Christian tradition to which Margery strongly assented, chastity, virginity, and celibacy are three distinct concepts. Chastity is understood as a virtue to which all Christians are called, no matter their state in life. It involves the proper ordering of sexual desire, preventing lustful passions from controlling a person’s actions and allowing sexuality to become an integrated part of one’s character. Chastity does not necessarily entail virginity. Nor does it require choosing celibacy, as Margery did in her later life. Rather, pursuing chastity involves ordering one’s desires rightly, so that one might not be distracted from the main task of the Christian: the contemplation of God.
Today, this understanding of chastity may seem foreign to us, but in Margery’s time, it was widely shared. As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has observed, “the medieval world is one which recognizes how easily any grasp of the notion of a supreme good may be lost by worldly distraction.”
Margery’s Book mentions virgin martyrs from the early church, such as St. Catherine of Alexandria, a fourth-century Egyptian martyr. But Margery also refers to women who went through periods of abstinence within marriage and who lived closer to her own time. St. Bridget of Sweden (1303-73), for example, was married at thirteen, persuaded her husband to remain celibate for two years, had eight children by him, and eventually devoted herself to pilgrimage after his death. Mary of Oignes (who died in 1213) was married at fourteen but persuaded her husband to live in celibacy, and they spent their married life nursing lepers together. Blessed Dorothea of Montau (1347-94), though not mentioned by Margery, also could have been an inspiration, as Barry Windeatt points out in the Penguin Introduction to Margery’s Book (2004). Dorothea, like Margery, was illiterate. She was married at sixteen to a man who treated her unkindly and had nine children, only one of whom survived into adulthood. Eventually, she persuaded her husband to take a vow of celibacy.
The concept of a celibate marriage is difficult for us to wrap our heads around (made even more difficult by the fact that medievals often referred to them as “chaste marriages” rather than “celibate” ones). Why not just remain single, if you’re going to abstain from sex? Although they were not common, “chaste marriages” were not anomalies in Margery’s time, nor in the centuries preceding.
Margaret McGlynn and Richard J. Moll explain in the Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (1993) that a celibate marriage “is a normal marriage in every sense except that the participants abstain from sexual activity. Throughout the Middle Ages this practice was undertaken by many people in different parts of the Christian world, at different times and for a variety of reasons.” Conor McCarthy, in Marriage in Medieval England: Law, Literature and Practice (2012), explains the concept similarly, adding that “one party to a marriage cannot take a vow of chastity without the consent of the other, and so [Margery] Kempe, despite her wish to live chastely, is obliged to continue to render the marital debt” until her husband agrees to release her from that obligation.
Celibate marriages were often motivated by the spouses’ desire to redirect their desires towards adoration of God. For many centuries, there was debate within the Catholic Church about whether a marriage’s validity was defined by mutual consent to entering the sacrament (Augustine’s view) or whether consummation was required. Either way, it was simultaneously true that spouses were expected to make a gift of themselves to each other through marital intimacy, and that sexual activity could later be suspended indefinitely if both spouses discerned that it was the right course of action.
Putting the question of channeling one’s desires towards the contemplative life aside, it is not difficult to see how such an attitude towards sexuality had clear advantages for women at that time. A mutual agreement to abstinence could have prevented further pregnancies when a woman was experiencing challenging health conditions. And while medieval societies technically did not allow arranged marriages because of the emphasis that Christianity placed on consent (an idea that was quietly revolutionary, as Tom Holland argues in Dominion), many marriages were, in practice, the result of pressure placed on young people for the financial or political advantages of their parents. In such cases, like those of St. Bridget and Blessed Dorothea, persuading one’s spouse to make a vow of celibacy could provide respite for women who may not have genuinely chosen that marriage freely.
The Importance—and Limits—of Consent
In contemporary sexual ethics, we have rightly retained an emphasis on consent. Unfortunately, because our culture has become detached from any deeper moral framework, we no longer consider that the virtue of chastity could be required for true human flourishing.
Again, chastity does not require celibacy or virginity. But it does require self-restraint. In the wake of the sexual revolution, consent is generally regarded as the last widely shared standard of sexual morality. Yet we know that consenting to any given act doesn’t mean that it’s good for us or that it will be enjoyable. That Gen Z men and women are now having less sex than their millennial counterparts may be evidence that liberty without virtue soon loses its appeal.
This is not to suggest that women don’t enjoy sex. Many hagiographies of female saints do focus on their husband’s intemperate desire for them, but not all women experienced this desire as one-sided. In “Chaste Marriage, Sexual Desire, and Christian Martyrdom in La vie seinte Audrée” (2010), Virginia Blanton argues that the life of St. Audrée tells a different story. A twelfth or thirteenth-century text, possibly written by the French writer of lays Marie de France and based on the figure of Aethelthryth (d.679), an Anglo-Saxon queen who founded the monastery at Ely, it recounts how Audrée entered two arranged marriages. In the latter, her second husband tried to consummate the marriage by force, which fortunately she was able to resist. But in her first marriage, it was she, not her first husband, “who experienced sexual desire for her spouse, it was she who had to resist the carnality of her own body.” And unlike the stories of other female saints, such as Christina of Markyate and Justina of Antioch (for whom carnal desire was said to be the result of demonic influence), there is no mention of anything un- (or super-) natural in Audrée’s passions.
Blanton calls this a “strange aberration on the hagiographical landscape,” but it is not quite so. For one, as McGlynn and Moll point out, Margery herself “is conspicuous by her absence from most discussions of the subject. She is occasionally mentioned as an anomaly, but only rarely is she seriously considered.” That Margery talks of inordinate passion for her husband in her youth tells us that there was a time she was not averse to sex. She didn’t make a vow of chastity because sex was altogether repulsive to her. Rather, in light of its exceedingly difficult personal consequences, she felt called to practice restraint and to devote herself to God in her middle and old age.
We may scoff at the thought that a woman who enjoys sex would choose to forego it, even within marriage, to spend more time in prayer and contemplation. It certainly feels alien to me, even though I personally share Margery’s religious faith. Regardless, the point remains: vows of celibacy allowed women the freedom to refuse sex they didn’t want, whether by vowing lifelong virginity or by agreeing with their husbands to practice short- or long-term periods of abstinence.
Integrating Chastity and Consent
Of course, as we have seen, late medieval society only allowed for outright refusal of sexual activity within certain limits. Margery did not cease to have sex with her husband until he agreed to the vow of celibacy, and according to the moral dictates of her time, she would not have been justified in doing so had she tried.
In the centuries since Margery’s time, the traditional teaching on conjugal debt has developed within Catholicism to ensure that it is not misused to justify one spouse from forcing or pressuring the other into marital intimacy. Crucial to this development was Gaudium et Spes (1965), a document published in the Second Vatican Council, which replaces the increasingly misunderstood language of “debt” with the language of “gift.” Likewise, building on his own scholarship and teaching, as well as Vatican II, Pope John Paul II, in the apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem (1988), emphasizes that, as humans, we exist to “become a gift.” This means that “the matrimonial union requires respect for and a perfecting of the true personal subjectivity of both [husband and wife]. The woman cannot become the ‘object’ of ‘domination’ and male ‘possession.’” Margery and women like her would have likely benefited from the language of self-gift, and more still, the imprimatur of her church, when trying to negotiate abstinence in her own marriage.
Even so, Margery’s distinctly medieval and Christian worldview has something important to offer us today. Margery had a large family and clearly cared for her husband, but she could also envision a fulfilling existence while abstaining from sex. Unlike millennials, who fully embraced hookup culture, and Zoomers, who are increasingly moving towards involuntary celibacy, Margery practiced restraint, self-gift, and discernment.
Perhaps hers is the view of sex women today are after: not essential, not a right to be demanded of the other, but a gift of the self, given in particular seasons of life. We justly recognize today that consent is necessary to respect the dignity of the individual human person. But, as strange as the word may sound to our postmodern ears, grounding the concept of consent in the virtue of chastity may be exactly what our world needs today.
