A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe

This collection of essays aims to return the English contemplative Margery Kempe to her historical context, in reaction to a recent tendency to fictionalise her as a mere figure in her Book, whose adventures, like those of Sir John Mandeville, may correspond to no historical reality. That hypercritical stance was never credible: of the many records of personal religious experience written in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, The Book of Margery Kempe must be the richest in allusion to contemporary figures and incidents, and, as Hope Emily Allen and S.B. Meech showed long ago in the critical edition, these casual references are circumstantial, and accord with independent evidence of an historical Margery Kempe, a John Kempe and a John Brunham, her father. This collection makes the most of them. Barry Windeatt sets the pace with an assessment of contemporary scholarship on Margery, rebalancing the evidence of the Book by restoring

Adventure · Allusion · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Casual · Circumstantial evidence · Contemplation · Context (archaeology · Faith · Fifteenth · Literature · Scholarship · Theology · Classics · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy