Encountering the Book of Margery Kempe - Paperback

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

This innovative volume harnesses the interdisciplinarity and flexibility of 'encounter' to provide dynamic readings The Book of Margery Kempe in the twenty-first century. Incorporating thirteen original chapters and a critical introduction, it offers myriad exciting approaches to this important and ever-surprising medieval text.

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