Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader

Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader
Author :
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Total Pages : 360
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781501708152
ISBN-13 : 1501708155
Rating : 4/5 (155 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader by : Rebecca L. Krug

Download or read book Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader written by Rebecca L. Krug and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.


Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader Related Books

Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader
Language: en
Pages: 360
Authors: Rebecca L. Krug
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2017-03-07 - Publisher: Cornell University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Since its rediscovery in 1934, the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe has become a canonical text for students of medieval Christian mysticism and spiritua
Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe
Language: en
Pages: 182
Authors: Laura Kalas
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2021-11-30 - Publisher: Manchester University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This innovative critical volume brings the study of Margery Kempe into the twenty-first century. Structured around four categories of ‘encounter’ – textua
Margery Kempe
Language: en
Pages: 249
Authors: Anthony Bale
Categories: Biography & Autobiography
Type: BOOK - Published: 2021-09-16 - Publisher: Reaktion Books

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A fresh account of the medieval mystic, traveling pilgrim, and pioneering memoirist Margery Kempe. This is a new account of the medieval mystic and pilgrim Marg
The Book of Margery Kempe
Language: en
Pages: 302
Authors: Margery Kempe
Categories: Biography & Autobiography
Type: BOOK - Published: 2005-07-28 - Publisher: Penguin UK

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A remarkable medieval woman's life and the earliest surviving autobiography in English, now updated with new material The story of the eventful life of Margery
Intimate Reading
Language: en
Pages: 261
Authors: Jessica Barr
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2020-04-20 - Publisher: University of Michigan Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Intimate Reading: Textual Encounters in Medieval Women’s Visions and Vitae explores the ways that women mystics sought to make their books into vehicles for t