The Book of Margery Kempe Themes

It's hard being Margery Kempe. In her "material girl" phase, she learns that loyal workers are hard to find: one sign of divine anger, and off they pop to find more stable employment. Her spiritual...

Think a life of contemplation keeps Margery Kempe from hard work and physical discomfort? Not a chance. In The Book of Margery Kempe, the practice of affective piety is all about emotional discomfo...

Campy Kempe practices something called affective piety, which is all about imaginatively entering into the life and suffering of Christ and his mother, Mary. There's usually a trigger in the physic...

Spoken language is pretty crucial in The Book of Margery Kempe, because guess what: like most women at the time, this lady could not read or write. (Which makes it all the more extraordinary that s...

Because the heroine of The Book of Margery Kempe practices affective piety—a kind of spirituality in which she focuses on Christ's humanity and his mother's joys and sorrows—her responses are o...

Sure, The Book of Margery Kempe is an autobiography, but remembering the past isn't the only kind of memory you'll see on these pages. In this book, memorial behavior—things like participation in...

In the world of The Book of Margery Kempe, the struggle between good and evil is not obscure or philosophical. There is a devil, and there is a God. There are also demons that do the devil's dirty...

In The Book of Margery Kempe, there are a lot of things working against a woman like Kempe, who's trying to live her vocation. Kempe's a wife and mother—not a virgin who can take the veil and liv...

In The Book of Margery Kempe, our heroine kind of lives in two worlds. She pretty easily slips from her world into Christ's, often by means of a "trigger"—the appearance of a handsome man, for ex...

Kempe's encounters with God and other human beings are all about love, but the way she talks about all of this can be confusing if you're not up on your mystical lit. Erotic love, something that Ke...