QUESTIONS about teaching as an aim and activity in The Book of Margery iKempe – whether Margery Kempe's role constitutes teaching, or whether her book sets out to teach through some didactic design on its readership – can offer fruitful approaches to understanding the Book in the present. What is Margery Kempe's book for?

How to cope with aspects of Margery Kempe's conduct that seem to appropriate a teaching role is something that challenges her contemporary society. It raises issues about her claims, for with what authority is she dispensing instruction (if she is), and precisely what is she teaching? The prospect of a woman engaged in teaching was especially disturbing in the context of contemporary concerns, concurrent with Kempe's active career, about the Lollards and their vernacular theology. The archbishop of York wants Kempe to swear that she will not teach nor call to account the people in his diocese, but she declines so to swear, reserving the right ‘to speak of God’ (which includes the right habitually to reprove people for their blasphemous swearing, or misspeaking of God). Indeed, she is so bold as to claim that ‘the Gospel yevyth me leve to spekyn of God’, which predictably provokes a great cleric to cite St Paul against her that no woman should preach. Kempe's response is to distinguish between preaching in a pulpit (which, of course, she does not do) and that kind of general moral exhortation to one's fellows, which is for her inseparable from Christian daily life: ‘I preche not, ser, I come in no pulpytt. I use but comownycacyon [i.e. conversation] and good wordys, and that wil I do whil I leve’ (chapter 52; p. 253). When she is then also accused of telling anticlerical tales, Kempe's reaction is to tell her tale of the bear and the pear tree, which does indeed confront clerical abuses, and might serve as a preacher's exemplary story in a sermon. Yet, to their credit (and Kempe’s), her clerical audience are variously pleased and moved by this tale, and her accuser declares himself smitten with remorse.