Encountering the Book of Margery Kempe - Paperback

by Laura Kalas (Editor), Laura Varnam (Editor)

This innovative critical volume brings the study of Margery Kempe into the twenty-first century. Structured around four categories of 'encounter' - textual, internal, external and performative - the volume offers a capacious exploration of The Book of Margery Kempe, characterised by multiple complementary and dissonant approaches. It employs a multiplicity of scholarly and critical lenses, including the intertextual history of medieval women's literary culture, medical humanities, history of science, digital humanities, literary criticism, oral history, the global Middle Ages, archival research and creative re-imagining. Revealing several new discoveries about Margery Kempe and her Book in its global contexts, and offering multiple ways of reading the Book in the modern world, it will be an essential companion for years to come.

Back Jacket

This innovative volume demonstrates the richness and diversity of Margery Kempe studies in the twenty-first century. Through multiple, probing 'encounters', it generates and inspires interdisciplinary, overlapping, supportive, disruptive, and exploratory theoretical and creative approaches to the Book, while serving as an invaluable critical companion.

Structured around four categories of encounter - textual, internal, external, and performative - the volume suggests thematic threads while also revealing how The Book of Margery Kempe resists strict categorisation. The chapters, written by leading scholars in Margery Kempe studies, cover a broad range of approaches, including theories of psychoanalysis, emotion, ecocriticism, autobiography, post-structuralism, and performance. They also adopt diverse methodologies, drawn from the medical humanities, history of science, history of medieval women's literary culture, digital humanities, literary criticism, oral history, the Global Middle Ages, archival discovery, and creative re-imagining. Taken together, these rich, multifarious encounters with the Book capture its remarkable depth and variety.

Encounters are dynamic, but they always require negotiation and reciprocity.Examining how encountering Kempe and her Book is a multi-way process, this volume paves the way for future, critical work.

Author Biography

Laura Kalas is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Swansea University
Laura Varnam is Lecturer in Old and Middle English Literature at University College, Oxford