Margery Kempe's Dissenting Book

Staley has used and made advances on the best recent writing on Margery Kempe, and her book is a consolidation of the new position that has been won for the Book in English literary culture and history. Her distinction of 'Kempe' and 'Margery' will become the standard mode of reference, I think, and her argument concerning the narrative purposes and 'fictional' status of the story, and its implication in questions of authority, in the broadest sense, will be generally accepted as definitive.---Derek Pearsall, Harvard University"In this extremely original study, Lynn Staley argues that the Book of Margery Kempe is an exploratory and subtle work, exploring the communities, practices, and values of her fellow Christians. It turns out that this exploration is far more searching and critical than any studies of Kempe's work have appreciated. In elaborating the relevant arguments, Staley offers a range of fascinating readings of Kempe's relations to Lollardy, to the vernacular, to received rhetorics of gender, and to issues of national identity and its sacralizing construction in the reign of Henry V. Not only is the Book far more critical of late medieval church and of mercantile life than existing scholarship has suggested, it develops a radical investigation of the dominant social institutions and forms of relationship in late medieval England. Furthermore, Staley argues that Kempe produces a vision of a new ecclesia, one shaped by women and women's relations, in the face of a fragmented but habitually violent and persecutory set of ruling institutions and practices. This book is a major contribution to medieval studies."---David Aers, Duke UniversityMargery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions, a contextual and historical study of the Book, focuses on Kempe's ability to construct a fiction that exploits the conventions of sacred biography and devotional prose as the means of scrutinizing the very foundations of fifteenth-century English society. Thus, though the Book isRead More