Margery Kempe’s Strategic Vague Language

Abstract

This chapter continues the previous analysis of heretics’ speech from the perspective of Conversation Analysis. Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism sets Kempe’s pragmatic thinking in a sociolinguistic frame. The narrative of her examinations at the Archbishop of York’s court suggests that people’s thinking about how language defines, expresses, controls, and resists also informed how they pragmatically and metapragmatically constructed their speech for social survival, subjective authority, or agency in asymmetric or hostile interactions. Medieval grammarians’ and logicians’ concerns with reference and equivocatio (ambiguity, polysemy, vagueness) were reinterpreted in controversies about how heretics and nonconformists talk in hostile institutional situations. Kempe’s sophisticated use of evasive, vague, hedged, and recontextualized speech and situational pragmatics proves more than a match for the Archbishop and his clerks.