Abstract
The protagonist of The Book of Margery Kempe says that sche cowde non other langage than Englisch (i.33). Nevertheless, this autohagiography contains numerous episodes in which Margery Kempe is able both to communicate with speakers of Italian and German and to utter biblical quotations in Latin. This paper investigates such multilingual encounters from a sociopragmatic and language-contact perspective and posits Margery’s limited receptive competence in Latin and, especially, Low German. Her linguistic skills are set against the background of historical facts known about Kempe and her family networks at Bishop’s Lynn, Norfolk, and Danzig, Prussia.
Timofeeva, Olga