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The estates satire tradition is a well-studied one, particularly in terms of the work of Geoffrey Chaucer. Some estates have been more investigated than others; in particular, work on antifralcmal and anticlerical satire has done much in recent years to complicate our understanding of that portion of the tradition, and to clarify that the clerical malpractice of satire does not necessarily reflect historical facts. What has been studied less is satire of the estate of merchants, though again in die case of Chaucer some work has been done. While thought has been given to the effects of the satirical tradition on certain estates satirized, no one has discussed how Margery Kempe in her Book o/ Margery Kempe effectively demonstrates the ways in which satirical representations of merchants might be internalized.* With the goal of examining how her responses to an ¿mercantilism allow Kernpe to approach a hybrid mystic and mercantile subjectivity, then, this essay explores the antimercantile anxiety of her Book. She presents herself in opposition to the stereotypes of merchants and trade familiar from the estates satire tradition, and her overt yet partial rejection ol the ideology of her birth-estate colors her interactions with the material world. Her association of materialism and merchandise is familiar from the satire tradition, and particularly from fkrs Ploumum; Kempe has taken die satires to heart, and we can read her Book in part as demonstrating the subject position of a successfully satirized merchant from the inside.
Critics have argued for some time diat Margery Kempe and her Book are resolutely anti-ltbourgeois." Certainly such a view has adequate support within Kempe's text:' even Anthony Goodman's discussion of her interaction with die community in Lynn recognizes "Margery's rejection of bourgeois norms of familial, parochial, and commercial life.'v' Unfortunately, relatively little has been done with Kempe's estate-position which does not share Goodman's unsophisticated use of the term "bourgeois," a term which is problematic and somewhat anachronistic in its implication of easy continuity between modern and medieval notions of class. Certainly Kempe was "bourgeois" in the sense that her father and husband were burgesses, members of die twelve-man committee which chose the mayor and other civic officers. While her family connections were quite prominent in the town, diat is not entirely the...