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. 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...

The writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe show an awareness of traditional and contemporary attitudes towards women, in particular medieval attitudes towards the female body. This study examines the extent to which they make use of such attitudes in their writing, and investigates the importance of the female body as a means of explaining their mystical experiences and the insight gained from them; in both writers, the female body is central to their writing, leading to a feminised language through which they achieve authority and create a space in which they can be heard,...

This volume of essays focuses on religious reclusion in England commonly referred to as anchoritic enclosure which reached the height of its popularity, particularly for women, in the later Middle Ages. Examining this extraordinary phenomenon of voluntary, permanent solitary enclosure in a cell attached to a church from a number of different perspectives, "Rhetoric of the Anchorhold" demonstrates how the rhetoric of this form of enclosure became a key part of religious discourse. Exploring how the anchorhold s associations traveled into lay culture, this volume argues for the centrality of...

Originating in the deserts of northern Africa in the early years of Christianity, anchoritism, or the enclosed solitary life, gradually metamorphosed into a permanent characteristic of European religiosity; from the twelfth century onwards, and throughout the middle ages, it was embraced with increasing enthusiasm, by devoted laywomen in particular. This book investigates the wider cultural importance of medieval anchoritism within the different religious landscapes and climates of the period. Drawing upon a range of contemporary gender and spatial theories, it focuses on the gender dynamics...

The training and use of memory was crucial in medieval culture, given the limited literacy at the time, but to date, very little thought has been given to the complex and disparate ways in which the theory and practices of memory interacted with the inherently unstable concepts of time and gender at the time. The essays in this volume, drawing on approaches from applied poststructural and queer theory among others, reassess those ideologies, meanings and responses generated by the workings of memory within and over -time-. Ultimately, they argue for the inherent instability of the traditional...

Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth/early fifteenth-century anchoress and mystic, is one of the most important and best-known figures of the Middle Ages. Her Revelations, intense visions of the divine, have been widely studied and read; the first known writings of an English woman, their influence extends over theology and literature. However, many aspects of both her life and thought remain enigmatic. This exciting new collection offers a comprehensive, accessible coverage of the key aspects of debate surrounding Julian. It places the author within a wide range of contemporary literary,...

An examination of the growth and different varieties of anchoritism throughout medieval Europe.

Initiates a wider development of inquiries into women's literary cultures to move the reader beyond single geographical, linguistic, cultural and period boundaries. Since the closing decades of the twentieth century, medieval women's writing has been the subject of energetic conversation and debate. This interest, however, has focused predominantly on western European writers working within the Christian tradition: the Saxon visionaries, Mechthild of Hackeborn, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Gertrude the Great, for example, and, in England, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe are cases in point....