Richard Salthouse of Norwich and the Scribe of The Book of Margery Kempe

Abstract

Introduction: "Jhesu mercy quod Salthows" "Jhesu mercy quod Salthows" (" 'thanks be to Jesus!' says Salthouse") are the last words of the unique surviving manuscript (now London, British Library Additional MS 61823) of The Book of Margery Kempe. It is an unremarkable and conventional scribal signing-off for the singular account of the remarkable life of Margery Kempe (d. c. 1439). In recent years Kempe's Book has been mined by literary scholars and historians for the information it provides about lay piety, women's devotion, and lifewriting in late medieval England, but "Salthows", the scribe of the unique surviving manuscript of her Book, has been given little attention. In this essay I suggest that Salthouse is an important figure in establishing the circumstances of the Book's reception and early reiteration. Since its rediscovery in 1934 (when the unique manuscript was happened upon in a country-house) the physical manuscript of the Book has received far less attention than its protagonist. 1 This is, perhaps, because the notes of the first critical edition, published in 1940 by the Early English Text Society and edited by Sanford An early rehearsal of some of the ideas in this essay appeared as "The Woman in White," The Times Literary Supplement,

Ugly Book Feelings: Materiality and Negative Affect in Late Medieval Women’s Writing

“…This episode draws attention to the way textual representations of books and manuscripts can become highly complex signifiers of perfect or imperfect materiality: medieval books can simultaneously exist in physical, symbolic and semiotic states.37 Bale, for example, is drawing on this episode when he describes the medieval book's 'exemplary status as an efficacious vehicle for engaging with the world' , while Liz McAvoy draws out an important symbolic thread that links Margery's own experience of childbirth and maternity to this redemptive vision of the child, perhaps a figure for the son who will help her write her own book. 38 Kempe tells us that a number of scholars and clerics offered to help her 'wryten and makyn a booke of hyr felyngys and hir revelacyons' , but that she is Emotions: History, Culture, Society 7 (2023) 9-29 'comawndyd in hir sowle' that she should not do so yet (44). When she is finally commanded by God to write down her visions, it is twenty years after she first began to experience them.…”