Top 10 Books About Margery Kempe

1. Book of Margery Kempe

by Margery Kempe, and Lynn Staley (Translator). W.W. Norton & Company. From the publisher: "The text presented here remains as faithful to the original Middle English as possible, without sounding archaic. Kempe's work is accompanied by an introduction, a map of medieval England, a Kempe lexicon, and explanatory annotations."

2. Book of Margery Kempe: The Autobiography of the Madwoman

by Tony D. Triggs and Margery Kempe. Liguori Publications. From the publisher: "Paints a vivid portrait of a unique medieval mystic whose passions and vanities were turned from self-absorption to the service of her Lord."

3. Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Kempe

by Liz Herbert McAvoy. Boydell & Brewer, Limited. From the publisher: "The writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe show an awareness of traditional and contemporary attitudes towards women, in particular medieval attitudes towards the female body. This study examines the extent to which they make use of such attitudes in their writing..."

4. Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature

by Emily Steiner. Cambridge University Press. From the publisher: "Covering a wide variety of medieval texts: sermons, lyrics, Piers Plowman, Mum and the Sothsegger, The Book of Margery Kempe, heretical writings, and trial records - this study will be of interest to scholars of medieval literary studies and medieval studies in general."

5. The Book of Margery Kempe

by Margery Kempe and Lynn Staley. Medieval Institute Publications. From the Introduction: "Written probably in the late 1430s, The Book of Margery Kempe is one of the most astonishing documents of late medieval English life. Its protagonist, who represents herself as its ultimate author, was not simply a woman but a woman thoroughly rooted in the world."

6. Book of Margery Kempe

by Margery B. Kempe, and John Skinner (Translator). Doubleday & Company. From the publisher: "Until this century, little was known about the English mystic Margery Kempe (ca. 1373-ca. 1440) except that she had an association with the great Julian of Norwich. This all changed in 1934 with the discovery of 'The Book of Margery Kempe' in a library where it had lain hidden for four hundred years."

7. Book of Margery Kempe

by Margery Kempe, and Barry Windeatt (Translator). Penguin Classic. From the publisher: "This earliest-known British autobiography is a remarkable and touching record of the author’s difficult pilgrimage from madness to Christian faith."

8. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women's Writing

by Carolyn Dinshaw (Editor), and David Wallace (Editor). Cambridge University Press. From the publisher: "Beginning with an examination of the different stages of women's lives--childhood, virginity, marriage and widowhood, this Companion addresses various aspects of medieval life that affected women's writing."

9. Margery Kempe and Her World

by Anthony E. Goodman. Pearson Education. From the publisher: "Margery Kempe is one of the most extraordinary figures in English medieval history. Daughter of a mayor of King's Lynn, wife of a burgess and mother of fourteen children, she was also the author of the first surviving autobiography composed by an Englishwoman. 'The Book of Margery Kempe,' dictated in the 1430s, survives in a single manuscript which was discovered in the 1930s."

10. God's Lovers in an Age of Anxiety: The Medieval English Mystics

by Joan M. Nuth. Orbis Books. From the publisher: "Though each of the five writers discussed by Joan Nuth has a unique voice, Richard Rolle, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe shared a common experience of living in an age of fear, violence and disintegration, and their work has a strange resonance for us, acting as 'distant mirrors' for the contemporary spiritual seeker."