Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (Studies in Medieval Mysticism) Book

Margery Kempe, mother, mystic, compulsive traveller, and Julian of Norwich, enclosed female anchorite, were contemporaries living and operating in late-medieval East Anglia. Both women were subject to vivid and life-changing visionary experiences in early womanhood and both women eventually came to writing in their more mature years. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that Margery Kempe was influenced by the older anchorite whom she visited in 1413. In this book, Liz Herbert McAvoy brings together these two remarkable writers for the first time in any consistent way, examining them alongside one another in order to extrapolate some of the ways in which their writing was affected by and made use of contemporary attitudes towards women and their problematic bodies. In particular, she argues that both writers consciously utilise -- indeed, frequently exploit -- current beliefs pertaining to motherhood, female sexuality and public use of the female voice in order to create a sense of authority in their writing and forge for themselves a space from which to speak. In so doing, each writer reconstructs the female body to formulate a series of hermeneutics which place that body at the forefront of her writing, simultaneously facilitating an understanding and justifying her mystical insights into God's love for humankind.Read More