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"Margery Kempe's various illnesses, mental, spiritual and physical, are a recurring theme in her Book. This volume, the first full-length interdisciplinary study from a medical humanities perspective, offers a medicalized reading of Kempe's spirituality in the context of the ubiquitous medieval notion of Christ the Physician, and thus a new way of interpreting the Book itself: as a narrative of Kempe's own engagement with the medical paradigms of which she has previously been a passive subject. Focusing on the interactions of medicine, mysticism and reproduction as a feminist project, the author explores the ontology of female flesh; the productive use of pain, suffering and sickness; and the ethics of a maternal theology based on the melancholic and surrogate activities that underlie Kempe's experience. Structured broadly via a traverse through the life course, the book shows how Kempe's response to suffering is illuminated by the medieval medical discourse by which she is contemporaneously read, and by which she engineers her own construction and understanding of self. It also explores Kempe's persistent attendance to her mystical body and refusal to compromise her instinct to authentically show how she feels. "--

Christian women --- Mysticism --- Women --- Medicine, Medieval --- Human females --- Wimmin --- Woman --- Womon --- Womyn --- Females --- Human beings --- Femininity --- Dark night of the soul --- Mystical theology --- Theology, Mystical --- Spiritual life --- Negative theology --- Women, Christian --- Religious life --- History. --- Early works to 1800. --- Health and hygiene --- History --- Kempe, Margery, --- Book of Margery Kempe (Kempe, Margery) --- To 1500 --- England. --- Angleterre --- Anglii͡ --- Anglija --- Engeland --- Inghilterra --- Inglaterra --- Christ the Physician. --- feminist. --- interdisciplinary study. --- maternal theology. --- medical discourse. --- medical humanities. --- medieval. --- mysticism. --- ontology. --- spirituality.

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"This innovative critical volume brings the study of Margery Kempe into the twenty-first century. Structured around four categories of 'encounter' - textual, internal, external and performative - the volume offers a capacious exploration of The Book of Margery Kempe, characterised by multiple complementary and dissonant approaches. It employs a multiplicity of scholarly and critical lenses, including the intertextual history of medieval women's literary culture, medical humanities, history of science, digital humanities, literary criticism, oral history, the global Middle Ages, archival research and creative re-imagining. Revealing several new discoveries about Margery Kempe and her Book in its global contexts, and offering multiple ways of reading the Book in the modern world, it will be an essential companion for years to come."--

Christian women --- Religious life --- Kempe, Margery, --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages in literature