Carolyn Dinshaw, "Temporalities."

Dinshaw, Carolyn. "Temporalities." Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English. Edited by Paul Strohm. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.

In her essay, Dinshaw uses The Book of Margery Kempe as a model to discuss conflated temporalities. Margery Kempe, as Dinshaw argues, is constantly in a state that congeals past, present, and future in her mystic attempts to gain access to Christ. Margery Kempe is often ciriticized and ridiculed for this process, although her text suggests that her approach to temporality is the more spiritually sound. For Dinshaw, Margery Kempe’s temporality invokes a queer sense of history, one that steps outside of the normative perceptions of time that is embodied in Kempe physically. In Dinshaw’s continued reading of The Book of Margery Kempe, she demonstrates how Kempe’s own body is at odds with the conflated temporality of her mind, bringing her closer to Christ’s suffering.

However, for Dinshaw Kempe’s temporality is only one part of the queer history of the subject, requiring consideration of Hope Allen, Kempe’s first modern editor, and Dinshaw herself as critics of Margery Kempe. In a sense, this section provides an interesting commentary on the work of medeivalists in general, or any critic of literature for that matter, as we are at the same time involved in the sociohistorical context of our specific texts, the critical history of those texts (sometimes spanning centuries), and our current research on that text. Dinshaw’s discussion of Hope Allen’s connection to Margery Kempe, speaking of her as a person she has an engaged relationship with, strikes familiar with how I’ve often heard colleagues and established critics describe their work, referring to Harley 2253 as “my manuscript” or even invoking Chaucer or Gower as a friend to join the conversation. Personally, I’ve even felt a rather fondness for the Wife of Bath from my MA thesis work, and often imagine her as an outside commentor on other Middle English texts I’m reading. While Dinshaw states early on that the point of conflated temporalities is not necessarily a new development in readings of Margery Kempe, or medieval literature for that matter, her consideration of how we as critics further conflate temporality adds an interesting perspective on our role of critics of medieval literature.