Author: Rebecca KrugPublisher:
ISBN: 9781501705335
Category : Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Comfort -- Despair -- Shame -- Fear -- Loneliness
Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader
Author: Rebecca L. KrugPublisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501708155
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360
Book Description
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
Author: Rebecca KrugPublisher:
ISBN: 9781501705335
Category : Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Comfort -- Despair -- Shame -- Fear -- Loneliness
The Book of Margery Kempe
Author: Margery KempePublisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0140432515
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 449
Book Description
The story of the eventful and controversial life of Margery Kempe - wife, mother, businesswoman, pilgrim and visionary - is the earliest surviving autobiography in English. Here Kempe (c.1373-c.1440) recounts in vivid, unembarrassed detail the madness that followed the birth of the first of her fourteen children, the failure of her brewery business, her dramatic call to the spiritual life, her visions and uncontrollable tears, the struggle to convert her husband to a vow of chastity and her pilgrimages to Europe and the Holy Land. Margery Kempe could not read or write, and dictated her remarkable story late in life. It remains an extraordinary record of human faith and a portrait of a medieval woman of unforgettable character and courage.
Gender, Culture and Politics in England, 1560-1640
Author: Susan D. AmussenPublisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350020699
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333
Book Description
Gender, Culture and Politics in England, 1560-1640 integrates social history, politics and literary culture as part of a ground-breaking study that provides revealing insights into early modern English society. Susan D. Amussen and David E. Underdown examine political scandals and familiar characters-including scolds, cuckolds and witches-to show how their behaviour turned the ordered world around them upside down in very specific, gendered ways. Using case studies from theatre, civic ritual and witchcraft, the book demonstrates how ideas of gendered inversion, failed patriarchs, and disorderly women permeate the mental world of early modern England. Amussen and Underdown show both how these ideas were central to understanding society and politics as well as the ways in which both women and men were disciplined formally and informally for inverting the gender order. In doing so, they give a glimpse of how we can connect different dimensions of early modern society. This is a vital study for anyone interested in understanding the connections between social practice, culture, and politics in 16th- and 17th-century England.
Reading Families
Author: Rebecca KrugPublisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501731823
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
Rebecca Krug argues that in the later Middle Ages, people defined themselves in terms of family relationships but increasingly saw their social circumstances as being connected to the written word. Complex family dynamics and social configurations motivated women to engage in text-based activities. Although not all or even the majority of women could read and write, it became natural for women to think of writing as a part of everyday life.Reading Families looks at the literate practice of two individual women, Margaret Paston and Margaret Beaufort, and of two communities in which women were central, the Norwich Lollards and the Bridgettines at Syon Abbey. The book begins with Paston's letters, which were written at her husband's request, and ends with devotional texts that describe the spiritual daughterhood of the Bridgettine readers.Scholars often assume that medieval women's participation in literate culture constituted a rejection of patriarchal authority. Krug maintains, however, that for most women learning to engage with the written word served as a practical response to social changes and was not necessarily a revolutionary act.
Margery Kempe
Author: Robert GluckPublisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681374315
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 193
Book Description
Lust, religious zeal, and heartache come together in this provocative novel about two infatuations, one between a man and his young lover in the late 20th century and another between a 15th-century woman and Jesus Christ. First published in 1994, Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe is one of the most provocative, poignant, and inventive American novels of the last quarter century. The book tells two stories of romantic obsession. One, based on the first autobiography in English, the medieval Book of Margery Kempe, is about a fifteenth-century woman from East Anglia, a visionary, a troublemaker, a pilgrim to the Holy Land, and an aspiring saint, and her love affair with Jesus. It is complicated. The other is about the author’s own love for an alluring and elusive young American, L. It is complicated. Between these two Margery Kempe, the novel, emerges as an unprecedented exploration of desire, devotion, abjection, and sexual obsession in the form of a novel like no other novel. Robert Glück’s masterpiece bears comparison with the finest work of such writers as Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus. This edition includes an essay by Glück about the creation of the book titled "My Margery, Margery's Bob."
Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe
Author: Laura KalasPublisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526146606
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182
Book Description
This innovative critical volume brings the study of Margery Kempe into the twenty-first century. Structured around four categories of ‘encounter’ – textual, internal, external and performative – the volume offers a capacious exploration of The Book of Margery Kempe, characterised by multiple complementary and dissonant approaches. It employs a multiplicity of scholarly and critical lenses, including the intertextual history of medieval women’s literary culture, medical humanities, history of science, digital humanities, literary criticism, oral history, the global Middle Ages, archival research and creative re-imagining. Revealing several new discoveries about Margery Kempe and her Book in its global contexts, and offering multiple ways of reading the Book in the modern world, it will be an essential companion for years to come.
Margery Kempe
Author: Anthony BalePublisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789144698
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 249
Book Description
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 Margery Kempe. Kempe, who had fourteen children, traveled all over Europe and recorded a series of unusual events and religious visions in her work The Book of Margery Kempe, which is often called the first autobiography in the English language. Anthony Bale charts Kempe’s life and tells her story through the places, relationships, objects, and experiences that influenced her. Extensive quotations from Kempe’s Book accompany generous illustrations, giving a fascinating insight into the life of a medieval woman. Margery Kempe is situated within the religious controversies of her time, and her religious visions and later years put in context. And lastly, Bale tells the extraordinary story of the rediscovery, in the 1930s, of the unique manuscript of her autobiography.
The Book of Margery Kempe
Author: Margery KempePublisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141915889
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Book Description
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 Kempe - medieval wife, mother, businesswoman, pilgrim and visionary - is the earliest surviving autobiography in English. Here Kempe recounts in vivid, unembarrassed detail the madness that followed the birth of the first of her fourteen children, the failure of her brewery business, her dramatic call to the spiritual life, her vow of chastity and pilgrimages to Europe and the Holy Land. Margery Kempe could not read or write, and dictated her story late in life: a remarkable portrait of a woman of unforgettable character and courage. This fully updated edition of Barry Windeatt's modern English translation includes a new introduction, notes and scholarly apparatus. Translated with a new introduction by Barry Windeatt
The Letters of Mina Harker
Author: Dodie BellamyPublisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1635901596
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Book Description
Bellamy's debut novel revives the central female character from Bram Stoker's Dracula and imagines her as an independent woman living in San Francisco during the 1980s. Hypocrisy's not the problem, I think, it's allegory the breeding ground of paranoia. The act of reading into--how does one know when to stop? KK says that Dodie has the advantage because she's physical and I'm "only psychic." ... The truth is: everyone is adopted. My true mother wore a turtleneck and a long braid down her back, drove a Karmann Ghia, drank Chianti in dark corners, fucked Gregroy Corso ... --Dodie Bellamy, The Letters of Mina Harker First published in 1998, Dodie Bellamy's debut novel The Letters of Mina Harker sought to resuscitate the central female character from Bram Stoker's Dracula and reimagine her as an independent woman living in San Francisco during the 1980s--a woman not unlike Dodie Bellamy. Harker confesses the most intimate details of her relationships with four different men in a series of letters. Vampirizing Mina Harker, Bellamy turns the novel into a laboratory: a series of attempted transmutations between the two women in which the real story occurs in the gaps and the slippages. Lampooning the intellectual theory-speak of that era, Bellamy's narrator fights to inhabit her own sexuality despite feelings of vulnerability and destruction. Stylish but ruthlessly unpretentious, The Letters of Mina Harker was Bellamy's first major claim to the literary space she would come to inhabit.