Encountering the Book of Margery Kempe

(Hardback)

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Description

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 womens 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.

Reviews

'The essays gathered in the volume evince our growing understanding of the artistry that undergirds a text that was once considered important but possibly artless. It is this artistry, this sure sense of the dynamics of narrative, of voice, of social and religious conventions and culture, that holds the volume itself together, giving it the implicit unity a gifted author provides to her or his later readers....This is a good volume of essays with which to continue the process of exploration and the joys of discovery.'
Lynn Staley, Harrington and Shirley Drake Professor of the Humanities, Colgate University, The Medieval Review

Author Bio

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