Margery Kempe And The Lonely Reader

Download or read book Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader written by Rebecca L. Krug and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader written by Rebecca Krug and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comfort -- Despair -- Shame -- Fear -- Loneliness

Download or read book Gender, Culture and Politics in England, 1560-1640 written by Susan D. Amussen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-04-06 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Reading Families written by Rebecca Krug and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Margery Kempe written by Robert Gluck and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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."

Download or read book The Medieval Invention of Travel written by Shayne Aaron Legassie and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-04-12 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of the Middle Ages, the economies of Europe, Asia, and northern Africa became more closely integrated, fostering the international and intercontinental journeys of merchants, pilgrims, diplomats, missionaries, and adventurers. During a time in history when travel was often difficult, expensive, and fraught with danger, these wayfarers composed accounts of their experiences in unprecedented numbers and transformed traditional conceptions of human mobility. Exploring this phenomenon, The Medieval Invention of Travel draws on an impressive array of sources to develop original readings of canonical figures such as Marco Polo, John Mandeville, and Petrarch, as well as a host of lesser-known travel writers. As Shayne Aaron Legassie demonstrates, the Middle Ages inherited a Greco-Roman model of heroic travel, which viewed the ideal journey as a triumph over temptation and bodily travail. Medieval travel writers revolutionized this ancient paradigm by incorporating practices of reading and writing into the ascetic regime of the heroic voyager, fashioning a bold new conception of travel that would endure into modern times. Engaging methods and insights from a range of disciplines, The Medieval Invention of Travel offers a comprehensive account of how medieval travel writers and their audiences reshaped the intellectual and material culture of Europe for centuries to come.

Download or read book Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe written by Laura Kalas and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.