the book of margery kempe an abridged translation

‘Wondirful revelacyons’, the moving of the soul through visionary experience, are the subject of Kempe’s narrative. Its powerful affect has surprised, compelled and alienated its readers. It is a book of feeling, shaped by but also startlingly different from the books Kempe knew. The Book of Margery Kempe speaks in unique ways to the exploration of inner lives, as well as to Boffey’s interests in the intellectual contexts of books. 1 Boffey’s recent research has extended her seminal work on the fifteenth century to chronicle and life-writing. Can lived inner experience also speak across the centuries? Julia Boffey describes evocatively ‘the difficulty of writing about individual inner lives without many of the written sources available for more recent periods’ yet, she suggests, ‘the pendulum may be swinging the other way’. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title.T he material and literary worlds of the medieval period remain richly alive in the twenty-first century. LIZ HERBERT McAVOY is Lecturer in Medieval Language and Literature, University of Leicester. With detailed introduction and challenging interpretive essay, this volume uncovers in particular the importance of motherhood, sexuality and female orality to the inception and expression of Margery Kempe's singular mystical experiences and adds to contemporary debate regarding the agency of holy women during the later middle ages. This new excerpted, thematically organised translation of the challenging text focuses on passages which will contextualise for the reader its author's reliance upon the experiences of her own maternal and sexualised body in an attempt to gain spiritual and literary authority. Simultaneously exasperating, endearing, vulnerable and eccentric, Margery Kempe, mother of fourteen children and wife to a bemused John Kempe, provides us with an autobiographical account of her own singular brand of affective piety - excessive weeping, lack of bodily control, compulsive travelling, visionary meditations - and the growth of what she regarded as an individual and privileged mystical relationship with Christ. A unique narrative of sin, sex and salvation, The Book of Margery Kempe comprises a text which has continued to perplex and fascinate contemporary audiences since its discovery in the library of an English country house in 1934.

The book of margery kempe an abridged translation