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Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe
Laura Kalas 
,
Laura Varnam
,
Laura Varnam
Swansea University Author:
Laura Kalas
Abstract
Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe illuminates the capaciousness of Margery Kempe studies in the twenty-first century. Through multiple, probing ‘encounters’, this innovative collection of essays generates and inspires interdisciplinary, overlapping, supportive, disruptive, and exploratory theor...
| ISBN: | 978-1-5261-4661-8 |
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| Published: |
Manchester
Manchester University Press
2021
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| Online Access: |
https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526146618/ |
| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa50553 |
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| Abstract: |
Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe illuminates the capaciousness of Margery Kempe studies in the twenty-first century. Through multiple, probing ‘encounters’, this innovative collection of essays generates and inspires interdisciplinary, overlapping, supportive, disruptive, and exploratory theoretical and creative approaches to the Book, and is a valuable new critical companion. Structured around four categories of encounter – textual, internal, external, and performative – the volume suggests particular thematic threads yet reveals the way in which The Book of Margery Kempe resists strict categorisation. The fundamental unruliness of the Book is a touchstone for the analyses in the volume’s essays, which define and destabilise concepts such ‘autobiography’ or ‘feeling’, and communities of texts and people, both medieval and modern. The essays, written by leading scholars in Margery Kempe studies, cover a broad range of approaches: theories of psychoanalysis, emotion, ecocriticism, autobiography, post-structuralism, and performance; and methodologies including 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. Deliberately diverse, these encounters with the Book capture the necessary expanse that it demands. Topics include the intertextuality of the Book, particularly in Europe; Kempe’s position within a global context, both urban and rural; the historicity of her life and kin; the Book’s contested form as a ‘life’ textualised and memorialised; and its performative, collaborative mode. Encounters are dynamic, but they always require negotiation and reciprocity. This volume examines how encountering Kempe and her Book is a multi-way process, and paves the way for future critical work. |
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| Keywords: |
Pilgrimage; autobiography; emotion; The Global Middle Ages; performance; ecocriticism; Mechthild of Hackeborn; Jerusalem ; Margaret Florentine; oral history |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |