- Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Uliana Brun
York University, Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, Undergraduate
- York University, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, Undergraduateadd
- I graduated from York University with an Honours BA in History. I am a member of the international Honours society the Golden Key. Foremost I am a Humanist.edit
Margery Kempe doesn’t join the rank of those canonized principally because her actions made her vocation questionable. Although, her meditations were on the love of Christ, she was often questioned and publically condemned. This essay... more
Margery Kempe doesn’t join the rank of those canonized principally because her actions made her vocation questionable. Although, her meditations were on the love of Christ, she was often questioned and publically condemned. This essay will attempt to examine why Margery’s love of Christ didn’t get her resounding ecclesiastical acceptance, when so many others who have contemplated on the subject of divine love have been acknowledged, if not canonized, by the Catholic Church. This will be accomplished through a comparative analysis of Gottfried Von Strasburg’s version of Tristan and the Book of Margery Kemp.
I intend to argue that Margery, a romantic herself, had a lot in common with the literary figures of Tristan and Isolde; and that it was these similarities, which best express the complexities in the intermingling of the pagan ideals of love and Christian morality within the medieval period. I will utilize the works of: Plato, Ovid, Thomas of Britain’s version of Tristan (to end Gottfried’s incomplete manuscript), and Dante; for the purpose of further exploration and a comparison of Margery’s understanding of divine love, with the type of earthly or pagan love, which Tristan and Isolde shared. The themes, which are utilized include: a comparison between Christian ideals of love and death, with the pagan worldview of Gottfried’s Tristan; and a comparison between Martyrdom for God and Martyrdom for love, and finally, a comparison between women in Christianity and in romances as femme fatals.
I intend to argue that Margery, a romantic herself, had a lot in common with the literary figures of Tristan and Isolde; and that it was these similarities, which best express the complexities in the intermingling of the pagan ideals of love and Christian morality within the medieval period. I will utilize the works of: Plato, Ovid, Thomas of Britain’s version of Tristan (to end Gottfried’s incomplete manuscript), and Dante; for the purpose of further exploration and a comparison of Margery’s understanding of divine love, with the type of earthly or pagan love, which Tristan and Isolde shared. The themes, which are utilized include: a comparison between Christian ideals of love and death, with the pagan worldview of Gottfried’s Tristan; and a comparison between Martyrdom for God and Martyrdom for love, and finally, a comparison between women in Christianity and in romances as femme fatals.
