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  • Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader by Rebecca Krug
  • Julie Orlemanski
rebecca krug, Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017. Pp. xii, 256. ISBN: 978–1–5017–0533–5. $65.

In this thoughtful monograph, Rebecca Krug argues that 'late medieval books offering spiritual comfort'—books like the Pricke of Conscience, the Chastising of God's Children, the Book of Tribulation, and Richard Rolle's Incendium Amoris—provided the fifteenth-century English mystic Margery Kempe both with an emotional vocabulary and with a specific aspiration for her own composition (p. 29). On Krug's account, the text now known as the Book of Margery Kempe responded to the limitations of other late-medieval spiritual guidebooks by offering Margerys 'lived life as a model for working through the problems of finding spiritual, emotionally felt comfort' (p. ix). Organized around five feelings—comfort, despair, shame, fear, and loneliness—Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader takes its orientation from the analytical categories of personal experience, rather than theological or discursive notions. The result is a sympathetic narrative of Kempe's 'self-in-the-making' as it takes shape 'both in lived experience and in the act of capturing and reenvisioning that life in writing' (p. ix).

A particular strength of Krug's monograph is its constant and insightful reference to the treatises, manuals, and devotional writings that influenced Kempe throughout her spiritual life. As Krug's close readings show, this influence extends from the Book's overarching consolatory aim to its strategic use of alliteration and rhyme. Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader builds on Krug's earlier study of women's participation in medieval literate culture (Reading Families: Women's Literate Practice in Late Medieval England [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2002]) to indicate how Kempe, who described herself as illiterate, was nonetheless steeped in late medieval England's devotional textuality and how she adapted this textuality to her own ends. Kempe's rhetorical self-consciousness emerges strikingly in Krug's numerous close readings. For example, in the penultimate chapter of the Book, Kempe confronts in London an old story about her supposed dietary fastidiousness, an exemplum-like narrative that apparently will not stop circulating. Krug illustrates with particular acuity how the episode in the Book both acts 'to reclaim the upper hand in relation to the power of proverbial language' and 'returns to the sense of lived shame' found in earlier phases of Kempe's spiritual narrative (pp. 133, 129). Similarly perceptive readings abound, demonstrating Kempe's discursive canniness.

Another welcome contribution of Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader is its attention to Kempe's appetite for 'group celebration and solidarity' within the 'spirituality of high desire' (p. 47). While acknowledging the Book's construction of [End Page 114] singular spiritual authority, Krug recasts the narrative arc in terms of the vicissitudes of Kempe's spiritual community. The discussion of Kempe's friendship with Thomas Marchale is particularly illuminating and moving. Krug's explorations of social desire foreground an aspect of Margery Kempe often lost to scholarly conversation, which has focused more on the mystic's pursuit of exceptionality than on her cultivation of community.

Not all of the book's claims are equally compelling. At points the organizing terms of comfort, despair, shame, fear, and loneliness feel more like hypostatizations of heterogeneous affects than like Kempe's own central notions. Occasionally Krug's line of argument relies too heavily on acknowledgedly speculative claims—such as the hypothesis that Kempe's 'secret sin' is a wish for suicide (p. 62). The informative discussion of method that appears in the 'Afterword' would have been better placed at the start, so that readers could understand from the outset how Krug arrived at her anchoring claims. More generally, the study faces the problem of scale that anyone writing on the Book of Margery Kempe confronts. Given the length of Kempe's Book, contentions about it can be supported with numerous examples while the character of the text as a whole nonetheless remains elusive. To that end, I found myself wishing that Krug had more often staged her broadest claims as disagreements with prior scholarly evaluations. How would she address the...

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