This paper appraises place pilgrimage to Jerusalem in two late-medieval English texts: The Itineraries of William Wey and The Book of Margery Kempe.
Margery Kempe and her Autobiography
July 22, 2015 By
Margery Kempe was a self-proclaimed holy woman, visionary, mystic and medieval pilgrim. She is also unique because although she was not proficient at reading and writing, she was determined to record her visions, journeys and spiritual experiences
Margery Kempe and the People on the Periphery
May 31, 2015 By
There are few medieval texts I find so entertaining as The Book of Margery Kempe, the fifteenth-century story of a seemingly ordinary woman of Bishops Lynn, England, whose life was transformed by visions of Jesus. T
Medieval mysticism or psychosis?
April 28, 2015 By
Alison Torn investigates the strange case of Margery Kempe
INTERVIEW: A Conversation with SD Sykes about Plague Land
October 3, 2014 By
My interview with fiction author, SD Sykes about her fantastic medieval crime novel, Plague Land.
‘Some Like it Hot’: The Medieval Eroticism of Heat
March 16, 2014 By
The late fourteenth-century romance Sir Launfal narrates the financial, martial and erotic adventures of one of the lesser-known knights of the Arthurian court.
An outside for the inside : a psychoanalytic reading of The Book of Margery Kempe
February 3, 2014 By
It is evident in Margery Kempe’s visions of holy family life that Virgin and Christ dyad is an oedipal fantasy of the child who is the father of himself.
The Orthodox Heresies: ‘Lollardy’ and Medieval Culture
January 23, 2014 By
This is not Margery Kempe’s first run-in with the law. Already, she has been accused multiple times of heresy, of wantonness, and of being a general pest.
Perceptions of insanity in medieval England
November 1, 2013 By
In a Christian society that perceived of a cosmic struggle between good and evil, madness was evidence of a battle lost.
Corpus Christi Plays and the Stations of the Cross: Medieval York and Modern Sydney
April 1, 2013 By
The earliest surviving reference to the Corpus Christi festival in York is dated 1322, when Archbishop William Melton commended it as „the glorious feast of the most precious sacrament of the flesh and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ‟. In 1408 the York Guild of Corpus Christi was established „as a confraternity of chaplains and lay persons, with the encouragement of the city government, probably to form the focus of the civic Corpus Christi Day procession‟.
Lay Writers and the Politics of Theology in Medieval England From the Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries
January 3, 2013 By
My intention is not to continue the discourse on such practices but to analyze narrative content in relation to the politics of theology that had an impact on lay writers and their artistic creativity concerning the search for selfhood from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries.
Rhetorics of Pain and Desire: The Writings of the Middle English Mystics
December 3, 2012 By
This dissertation “Rhetorics of Pain and Desire: The Writings of the Middle English Mystics,” seeks to explore the connections between desire and pain in the writings of Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe and Walter Hilton. All four writers develop a rhetoric that allows them to use pain and/or desire as a catalyst through which their writing becomes embodied.
“She should have more if she were ruled and guided by them”: Elizabeth Woodville and Margery Kempe, female agency in late medieval England
October 15, 2012 By
This thesis argues that while patriarchy was certainly present in England during the late medieval period, women of the middle and upper classes were able to exercise agency to a certain degree through using both the patriarchal bargain and an economy of makeshifts
Got Medieval?
September 25, 2012 By
Developing queer history through the concept of affective connection—a touch across time—and through the intentional collapse of conventional historical time, I wanted in Getting Medieval to help queer studies re- spond to such desire.
Madness and Gender in Late-Medieval English Literature
July 24, 2012 By
Madness has been long misrepresented in medieval studies. Assertions that conceptions of mental illness were unknown to medieval people, or that all madmen were assumed to be possessed by the devil, were at one time common in accounts of medieval society.
Convents, Courts and Colleges: The Prioress and the Second Nun
March 22, 2012 By
Pilgrimage, after Whitby, and before Vatican II, was a secular activity, a performance of piety by the laity, not by the clergy; although there were a few exceptions.7 Chaucer’s Monk, Friar, Prioress, Nun, Priest, Summoner, Pardoner and Parson ought not to be here. Their presence is outrageous comedy. Inns were forbidden to the cloistered clergy who, if they had to travel, were enjoined to stay in other monastic establishments along their route.
Englishwomen as Pilgrims to Jerusalem: Isolda Parewastell, 1365
March 22, 2012 By
Isolda Parewastell from Somerset, who was in Jerusalem in 1365, fitted into this fourteenth-century pattern. Despite the risks involved, women pilgrims were inspired by an instinct for travel and change, as well as by a sense of religious obligation and the hope of spiritual reward.
Love, Marriage, and Happiness: Changing Systems of Desire in Fourteenth-Century England
February 14, 2012 By
It is my intention not only to explore the discourse of love and desire in the fourteenth century, but also to examine how the ideas have been altered from those present in the Anglo-Norman and Latin material that was written or widely read in twelfth-century England and what pressures and influences may have brought about these changes.
Writers in religious orders and their lay patrons in late medieval England
February 6, 2012 By
Critics have long recognized that the religious orders played an important part in the production of vernacular devotional literature in late medieval England. The orders were well suited to this task. Reading and writing were an important part of the life of those who lived under a rule.
Producing the Middle English Corpus: Confession and Medieval Bodies
December 19, 2011 By
In Producing the Middle English Corpus: Confession and Medieval Bodies, I argue that confessional discourse played an important role in the creation of the Middle English canon.
Lewd Imaginings: Pedagogy, Piety, and Peformance in Late Medieval East Anglia
May 7, 2011 By
Lewd Imaginings: Pedagogy, Piety, and Peformance in Late Medieval East Anglia Sebastian, John Thomas PhD Dissertation, Cornell University, August (2004) Abstract This dissertation explores clerical and lay desires for spiritual teaching and learning at the end of the Middle Ages in England, desires that, while ostensibly contemplative, carried crucial ecclesiological, political, and literary implications. Where […]
The enigmatic threatening Margery Kempe
March 27, 2011 By
Illuminating the Soul: Religious Enclosure and the Validation of Mystical Experience in The Life of Christina of Markyate and The Book of Margery Kempe
February 25, 2011 By
Illuminating the Soul: Religious Enclosure and the Validation of Mystical Experience in The Life of Christina of Markyateand The Book of Margery Kempe Roberts, Ruth R. Marginalia, Vol. 3 (2006) Abstract The mind has a more extensive and expansive leisure within the six surfaces of a room than it could gain outside by traversing the […]
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