Margery Kempe and the lonely reader / Rebecca Krug.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Krug, Rebecca, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women authors, English--Middle English, 1100-1500--Biography.

Women authors, English.

Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages--Early works to 1800.

Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages.

Christian women--Religious life--England.

Christian women.

Kempe, Margery, approximately 1373- Book of Margery Kempe.

Kempe, Margery.

Kempe, Margery, approximately 1373-.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (241 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ithaca, New York ; London, [England] : Cornell University Press, 2017.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Comfort

2. Despair

3. Shame

4. Fear

5. Loneliness

Afterword

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Previously issued in print: 2017.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781501708152

1501708155

9781501708169

1501708163

OCLC:

957656484