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.
Rebecca Krug has written a deeply learned and humane book that situates Margery Kempe in the larger world of late medieval pious works of consolation. In Krug's reading of Kempe’s Book, however, Kempe is no mere imitator but a literate and engaged author who manipulates language and alters her writing process to see her way through despair, shame, fear, and loneliness. Kempe’s writing and revision process gives her community access to her own process of self-discovery and intense spiritual engagement. For medievalists interested in the world of late medieval piety, Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader is an important and compelling reinterpretation of a challenging and often puzzling text.
Nicholas Watson
This balanced, and sympathetic account of The Book of Margery Kempe as a book of consolation will be essential reading for anyone studying or teaching the work, the history of women's writing, or the history of religious thought and feeling. Especially valuable are Rebecca Krug’s close attention to the neglected topic of Kempe’s literary style and her refusal to choose between approaching the Book as a biographical source and as a work of literature. This is a richly thought-provoking and original study of what remains an endlessly puzzling and fascinating work.
Claire M. Waters
This learned and fascinating book presents Margery Kempe as one who reworks her life into writing as a way to respond to the books of consolation that were both deeply formative and deeply troubling to her. In doing so she created 'the book she wished she could have read' and offered her readers an imaginative point of entry into the ongoing process of spiritual development, one that valued feeling and lived experience as much as the textual tradition. Rebecca Krug reads Kempe and her Book in the full context of scholarship on Continental as well as English devotion and offers a particularly compelling account of collaboration, one that is intuitively persuasive but that also drives its point home with specific quotations from Kempe's Book.
Barbara Newman
Why did Margery Kempe, an avid aural reader of books of consolation, eventually feel the need to write her own? Rebecca Krug supplies an answer by attending keenly to Kempe's emotional experience. As she searches for comfort in God and wrestles with shame, fear, loneliness, and despair, Kempe confronts 'the power of negative thinking’ so deeply entrenched in late medieval devotional culture but finds no writer as committed as she was to grappling with the lived experience of these emotions. Krug’s wise, compassionate study offers a fresh look at both the rhetorical structures of Kempe’s Book and the emotional community that undergirds it.
