We’re delighted that Encountering is out in the world and already encountering readers! We first met back in 2014 at the ‘Margery Kempe at 80’ Birkbeck Medieval Seminar and then found ourselves presenting on panels together at conferences, talking about Margery Kempe. We quickly became known as the ‘two Lauras’ and it seemed natural that we should work together! Our research on Kempe comes from two different but complementary angles. Laura K works on Kempe and medical discourse, and theories of the life cycle, and Laura V on Kempe’s devotional performances, spaces, and material culture, so between us we felt that we had the expertise and breadth of knowledge to conceive of a volume of new approaches to Kempe- but we couldn’t have done it without our brilliant contributors and their innovations!
In Encountering we wanted to lay down the gauntlet for Kempe Studies in the twenty-first century. To ask, where are we now and where could we go in our study of Kempe and her capacious, hybrid Book? And we invited a range of scholars from different backgrounds and career stages to showcase and develop new research and fresh approaches. We hope that there’s something in the volume for everyone – whether your interests are historical, theoretical, cultural, or textual – and in that way the volume functions rather like a new ‘companion’ to The Book, to sit alongside Arnold and Lewis’s volume back in 2004. We also deliberately wanted the volume to be inclusive, not only in terms of the voices included but the variety of audiences addressed. From students coming upon Kempe for the first time or developing graduate work on her Book to established scholars rethinking their own interactions with Kempe. It was an incredibly exciting volume to put together and #TeamMargery really stepped up to produce, in our view, a superb book! (And our thanks go to the team at MUP for being wonderful to work with, from the series editors Anke Bernau, David Matthews, and James Paz to Meredith Carroll, Alun Richards, and the team on the editing and production front.)
A theme of our work together on Margery Kempe is collaboration and Laura V writes in the volume about the supportive female networks that sustained Margery’s own devotional life as expressed in The Book. We were thrilled to get permission to use an image from the Museo Nacional del Prado on the front cover – the swooning virgin and the deposition of Christ from Rogier van der Weyden’s fifteenth -century painting The Descent from the Cross. The weeping and the emotional response to the scene chimes with Margery’s devotions, of course! But we were also drawn to the ways in which the figures in the scene came together in support of Mary, Christ, and each other. There’s a moving and compassionate ‘touch’ at work in the scene and this really encapsulated how we wanted the volume to work, for the essays to ‘encounter’ one another in multiple ways that were supportive and generative, and operated across space, time, and through an embodied emotional response.
We theorised ‘encountering’ as our throughline for the volume because it expressed and enacted precisely the same capacious quality as Kempe’s Book itself. An ‘encounter’ can take place in geographical space (on pilgrimage, in St Margaret’s church, or at the church of the Holy Sepulchre) but it can also traverse time and place (visionary encounters with Christ, encounters between texts). Encounters can be supportive or antagonistic (as Margery’s encounters with her detractors demonstrate!). They can be planned or spontaneous, personal or social, material or imaginative, but above all dynamic, creative, and multiple. Moreover, we hope that the chapters in the volume not only offer exciting new encounters with Kempe and her Book but that those encounters might also offer fresh perspectives on our engagements with medieval literature in the twenty-first century more broadly too. Encountering Kempe and her Book is always a multi-way process!
We divided the volume into four sections – textual encounters, internal encounters, encountering the world, and performative encounters. In the first, Diane Watt explores what it might mean for us to consider The Book of Margery Kempe in the middle of a tradition of women’s writing, rather than at the beginning. Liz Herbert McAvoy and NaoĂ« Kukita Yoshikawa posit a new textual encounter in Mechthild of Hackeborn’s Boke of Gostlye Grace and Josephine Koster offers a fresh encounter with Margery’s prayers in the context of other Middle English prayer collections.
In ‘Internal encounters’, the two chapters by Ruth Evans and Johannes Wolf reconsider The Book‘s claims to ‘autobiography’ and the representation of the self, and Katherine Lewis examines The Book‘s confessional mode through a lens of oral history. Laura V explores Kempe’s exemplarity through her emotional connections with her female supporters in the devotional context of the heart.
‘Encountering the World’ includes exciting new historical discoveries, beginning with Anthony Bale and Daniela Giosuè’s identification of the woman known as ‘Margaret Florentyne’ and how this connection might present Kempe as a ‘Renaissance woman’. Susan Maddock’s new archival research re-examines Kempe’s worthy kin in Lynn and her social status, before we turn to Kempe’s travels in Europe and the Holy Land, with Laura K’s reassessment of Book II of Kempe’s work and Dorothy Kim’s Global Middle Ages approach which explores racialised soundscapes in Jerusalem.
Finally, Tara Williams and Sarah Salih take us right up to the present day: Salih examines Kempe as a performance artist in a fascinating parallel with Marina Abramovic and Williams reassesses Kempe’s famous meeting with fellow mystic Julian of Norwich, drawing on modern dramatisations and adaptations.
We’re really delighted by the range of approaches and materials in Encountering but it’s by no means the last word on Kempe Studies! We hope that the ways in which we model ‘encountering’ Kempe and her Book will inspire more scholars to approach the text in productive and innovative ways in the future. Margery Kempe is endlessly absorbing and we had a brilliant time putting the volume together.
Copies of Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe will be available to purchase on the MUP stand at the IMC conference. Alternatively, visit our virtual booth, and use discount code MED22 at the checkout to claim your 40% IMC discount.