Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh

Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh PDF Author: Karma Lochrie
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081220753X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book

Book Description
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1999 Karma Lochrie demonstrates that women were associated not with the body but rather with the flesh, that disruptive aspect of body and soul which Augustine claimed was fissured with the Fall of Man. It is within this framework that she reads The Book of Margery Kempe, demonstrating the ways in which Kempe exploited the gendered ideologies of flesh and text through her controversial practices of writing, her inappropriate-seeming laughter, and the most notorious aspect of her mysticism, her "hysterical" weeping expressions of religious desire. Lochrie challenges prevailing scholarly assumptions of Kempe's illiteracy, her role in the writing of her book, her misunderstanding of mystical concepts, and the failure of her book to influence a reading community. In her work and her life, Kempe consistently crossed the barriers of those cultural taboos designed to exclude and silence her. Instead of viewing Kempe as marginal to the great mystical and literary traditions of the late Middle Ages, this study takes her seriously as a woman responding to the cultural constraints and exclusions of her time. Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh will be of interest to students and scholars of medieval studies, intellectual history, and feminist theory.

Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh

Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh PDF Author: Karma Lochrie
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081220753X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book

Book Description
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1999 Karma Lochrie demonstrates that women were associated not with the body but rather with the flesh, that disruptive aspect of body and soul which Augustine claimed was fissured with the Fall of Man. It is within this framework that she reads The Book of Margery Kempe, demonstrating the ways in which Kempe exploited the gendered ideologies of flesh and text through her controversial practices of writing, her inappropriate-seeming laughter, and the most notorious aspect of her mysticism, her "hysterical" weeping expressions of religious desire. Lochrie challenges prevailing scholarly assumptions of Kempe's illiteracy, her role in the writing of her book, her misunderstanding of mystical concepts, and the failure of her book to influence a reading community. In her work and her life, Kempe consistently crossed the barriers of those cultural taboos designed to exclude and silence her. Instead of viewing Kempe as marginal to the great mystical and literary traditions of the late Middle Ages, this study takes her seriously as a woman responding to the cultural constraints and exclusions of her time. Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh will be of interest to students and scholars of medieval studies, intellectual history, and feminist theory.

The Book of Margery Kempe

The Book of Margery Kempe PDF Author: Marea Mitchell
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820474519
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Get Book

Book Description
The history of The Book of Margery Kempe from its first production in 1934 is also part of the history of English literary studies. Marea Mitchell traces some of the fascinating stories behind the proliferation of productions since then, including the involvement of Hope Emily Allen and other independent women scholars, popular receptions of the Book in World War II, and current productions that locate it as part of a medieval literary canon. Working from a cultural materialist perspective, Mitchell focuses on the materiality of the text itself and of the bodies of scholarship that have arisen around it.

The Book of Margery Kempe

The Book of Margery Kempe PDF Author: Margery Kempe
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0140432515
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Get Book

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.

Covert Operations

Covert Operations PDF Author: Karma Lochrie
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812207194
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book

Book Description
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book In Covert Operations, Karma Lochrie brings the categories and cultural meanings of secrecy in the Middle Ages out into the open. Isolating five broad areas—confession, women's gossip, medieval science and medicine, marriage and the law, and sodomitic discourse—Lochrie examines various types of secrecy and the literary texts in which they are played out. She reads texts as central to Middle English studies as the "Parson's Tale," the "Miller's Tale," the Secretum Secretorum, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as well as a broad range of less familiar works, including a gynecological treatise and a little-known fifteenth-century parody in which gossip and confession become one. As she does so she reveals a great deal about the medieval past—and perhaps just as much about the early development of the concealments that shape the present day.

Margery Kempe's Meditations

Margery Kempe's Meditations PDF Author: Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 0708319106
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Get Book

Book Description
The author argues that 'The Book of Margery Kempe' unfolds a creative experience of memory as spiritual progress, and explores Margery's meditational experience in the context of visual and verbal iconography.

Spiritual Economies

Spiritual Economies PDF Author: Nancy Bradley Warren
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204557
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Get Book

Book Description
From its creation in the early fourteenth century to its dissolution in the sixteenth, the nunnery at Dartford was among the richest in England. Although obliged to support not only its own community but also a priory of Dominican friars at King's Langley, Dartford prospered. Records attest to the business skill of the Dartford nuns, as they managed the house's numerous holdings of land and property, together with the rents and services owed them. That the Dartford nuns were capable businesswomen is not surprising, since the house was also a center of female education. For Nancy Bradley Warren, the story of Dartford exemplifies the vibrancy of nuns' material and spiritual lives in later medieval England. Revising the long-held view that fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English nunneries were impoverished both financially and religiously, Warren clarifies that the women in female monastic communities like Dartford were not woefully incompetent at managing their affairs. Instead, she reveals the complex role of female monasticism in diverse systems of production and exchange. Like the nuns at Dartford, women religious in late medieval England were enmeshed in material, symbolic, political, and spiritual economies that were at times in harmony and at other times in conflict with each other. Building on emerging cross-disciplinary trends in feminist scholarship on medieval religion, Warren extends ongoing debates about textual and economic constructions of women's identities to the rarely considered evidence of monastic theory and practice. To this end, Spiritual Economies emphasizes that the cloister was not impermeable. As worldly forces such as economic trends and political conflicts affected life in the nunneries, so too did religious practices have political impact. In breaking down the convent wall, Warren also succeeds in breaching the boundaries separating the material and the symbolic, the religious and the secular, the literary and the historical. She turns to a wide range of sources—from legislative texts, court records, and financial accounts to devotional treatises and political propaganda—to explore the centrality of female monasticism to the flowering of female spirituality and to the later Middle Ages at large.

Women and Disability in Medieval Literature

Women and Disability in Medieval Literature PDF Author: T. Pearman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230117562
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Get Book

Book Description
This book is first in its field to analyze how disability and gender both thematically and formally operate within late medieval popular literature. Reading romance, conduct manuals, and spiritual autobiography, it proposes a 'gendered model' for exploring the processes by which differences like gender and disability get coded as deviant.

Margery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions

Margery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions PDF Author: Lynn Staley
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027104022X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book

Book Description


The Book of Margery Kempe

The Book of Margery Kempe PDF Author: Margery Kempe
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 9780859917919
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Get Book

Book Description
Margery Kempe's text draws on her maternal, female body to illuminate her relationship to the divine. 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 in1934. 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 individual and privileged mystical relationship with Christ. This new excerpted, thematically organised translation of the challenging text focuses on passages which will contextualise for the reader its author's reliance upon the experiences of her own maternal and sexualised body in an attempt to gain spiritual and literary authority. With detailed introduction and challenging interpretive essay, this volume uncovers in particular the importance of motherhood, sexuality and female orality to the inception and expression of Margery Kempe's singular mystical experiences and adds to contemporary debate regarding the agency of holy women during the later middle ages. LIZ HERBERT McAVOY is Lecturer in Medieval Language and Literature, University of Leicester.

World of Echo

World of Echo PDF Author: Adin E. Lears
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501749617
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book

Book Description
Between late antiquity and the fifteenth century, theologians, philosophers, and poets struggled to articulate the correct relationship between sound and sense, creating taxonomies of sounds based on their capacity to carry meaning. In World of Echo, Adin E. Lears traces how medieval thinkers adopted the concept of noise as a mode of lay understanding grounded in the body and the senses. With a broadly interdisciplinary approach, Lears examines a range of literary genres to highlight the poetic and social effects of this vibrant discourse, offering close readings of works by Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, as well as the mystics Richard Rolle and Margery Kempe. Each of these writers embraced an embodied experience of language resistant to clear articulation, even as their work reflects inherited anxieties about the appeal of such sensations. A preoccupation with the sound of language emerged in the form of poetic soundplay at the same time that mysticism and other forms of lay piety began to flower in England. As Lears shows, the presence of such emphatic aural texture amplified the cognitive importance of feeling in conjunction with reason and was a means for the laity—including lay women—to cultivate embodied forms of knowledge on their own terms, in precarious relation to existing clerical models of instruction. World of Echo offers a deep history of the cultural and social hierarchies that coalesce around aesthetic experience and gives voice to alternate ways of knowing.