Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader
Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader
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Hardback
£65.00
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Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9781501705335
Number of Pages: 256
Published: 07/03/2017
Width: 15.2 cm
Height: 22.9 cm
Since its rediscovery in 1934, the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe has become a canonical text for students of medieval Christian mysticism and spirituality. Its author was a fifteenth-century English laywoman who, after the birth of her first child, experienced vivid religious visions and vowed to lead a deeply religious life while remaining part of the secular world. After twenty years, Kempe began to compose with the help of scribes a book of consolation, a type of devotional writing found in late medieval religious culture that taught readers how to find spiritual comfort and how to feel about one's spiritual life. In Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader, Rebecca Krug shows how and why Kempe wrote her Book, arguing that in her engagement with written culture she discovered a desire to experience spiritual comfort and to interact with fellow believers who also sought to live lives of intense emotional engagement.An unlikely candidate for authorship in the late medieval period given her gender and lack of formal education, Kempe wrote her Book as a revisionary act. Krug shows how the Book reinterprets concepts from late medieval devotional writing (comfort, despair, shame, fear, and loneliness) in its search to create a spiritual community that reaches out to and includes Kempe, her friends, family, advisers, and potential readers. Krug offers a fresh analysis of the Book as a written work and draws attention to the importance of reading, revision, and collaboration for understanding both Kempe's particular decision to write and the social conditions of late medieval women's authorship.
Introduction1. Comfort2. Despair3. Shame4. Fear5. LonelinessAfterword
Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader will appeal to scholars interested in medieval devotional culture, women writers, subjectivity, feminist autobiography, and affect studies. It takes Krug's previous work on women readers and writers (Reading Families: Women's Literate Practice in Late Medieval England) in new directions through its immersive engagement with one woman's literate practice.... At the same time that she provides a learned and detailed account of Kempe's literate practice, Krug reflects upon her own experience of writing Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader. * Studies in the Age of Chaucer * Krug writes humanely and with a generous interest in hearing and feeling Kempe, extending out this welcoming wish to her own audience. Some delightful transference occurs in this volume, for good reason and to good purpose, as Krug becomes a sort of avatar for Kempe, matching her as a companion, book for book-or, more humbly, by becoming her most recent scribe. Perhaps it's best to say that Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader is the book that Krug wishes 'she had had all along' in her own studies (8). Now we all do. * Modern Philology * A rare and rewarding marriage of twenty-first-century scholarship and medieval text.... Rebecca Krug's empathic and learned study offers much to those of us engaged in studying or teaching the history of religious thought, or of women's writing, as well as those who simply wish to address their own feelings with a spiritual sister. * The Way * Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader is a pleasure to read, a fresh and compact study that wears its considerable learning lightly. * Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal *
