The Book of Margery Kempe set in the context of medieval medical discourse.

The story of the eventful and controversial life of Margery Kempe - wife, mother, businesswoman, pilgrim and visionary - is the earliest surviving autobiography in English. Here Kempe (c.1373-c.1440) recounts in vivid, unembarrassed detail the madness that followed the birth of the first of her fourteen children, the failure of her brewery business, her dramatic call to the spiritual life, her visions and uncontrollable tears, the struggle to convert her husband to a vow of chastity and her pilgrimages to Europe and the Holy Land. Margery Kempe could not read or write, and dictated her remarkable story late in life. It remains an extraordinary record of human faith and a portrait of a medieval woman of unforgettable character and courage.

The Book of Margery Kempe set in the context of medieval medical discourse.

A collection of essays by twelve historians and literary critics who explore Margery Kempe, her Book, and her world.

A fresh account of the medieval mystic, traveling pilgrim, and pioneering memoirist Margery Kempe. This is a new account of the medieval mystic and pilgrim Margery Kempe. Kempe, who had fourteen children, traveled all over Europe and recorded a series of unusual events and religious visions in her work The Book of Margery Kempe, which is often called the first autobiography in the English language. Anthony Bale charts Kempe’s life and tells her story through the places, relationships, objects, and experiences that influenced her. Extensive quotations from Kempe’s Book accompany generous illustrations, giving a fascinating insight into the life of a medieval woman. Margery Kempe is situated within the religious controversies of her time, and her religious visions and later years put in context. And lastly, Bale tells the extraordinary story of the rediscovery, in the 1930s, of the unique manuscript of her autobiography.

According to an old story, a woman concealed her sex and ruled as pope for a few years in the ninth century, but her downfall came when she went into labor in the streets of Rome. From this myth to the experiences of saints, nuns, and ordinary women, The Oldest Vocation brings to life both the richness and the troubling contradictions of Christian motherhood in medieval Europe.

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women's Writing seeks to recover the lives and particular experiences of medieval women by concentrating on various kinds of texts: the texts they wrote themselves as well as texts that attempted to shape, limit, or expand their lives. The first section investigates the roles traditionally assigned to medieval women (as virgins, widows, and wives); it also considers female childhood and relations between women. The second section explores social spaces, including textuality itself: for every surviving medieval manuscript bespeaks collaborative effort. It considers women as authors, as anchoresses 'dead to the world', and as preachers and teachers in the world staking claims to authority without entering a pulpit. The final section considers the lives and writings of remarkable women, including Marie de France, Heloise, Joan of Arc, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and female lyricists and romancers whose names are lost, but whose texts survive.

An exploration of the relations between medical and religious discourse and practice in medieval culture, focussing on how they are affected by gender.

What religion does not serve as a theater of tears? Holy Tears addresses this all but universal phenomenon with passion and precision, ranging from Mycenaean Greece up through the tragedy of 9/11. Sixteen authors, including many leading voices in the study of religion, offer essays on specific topics in religious weeping while also considering broader issues such as gender, memory, physiology, and spontaneity. A comprehensive, elegantly written introduction offers a key to these topics. Given the pervasiveness of its theme, it is remarkable that this book is the first of its kind--and it is long overdue. The essays ask such questions as: Is religious weeping primal or culturally constructed? Is it universal? Is it spontaneous? Does God ever cry? Is religious weeping altered by sexual or social roles? Is it, perhaps, at once scripted and spontaneous, private and communal? Is it, indeed, divine? The grief occasioned by 9/11 and violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, and elsewhere offers a poignant context for this fascinating and richly detailed book. Holy Tears concludes with a compelling meditation on the theology of weeping that emerged from pastoral responses to 9/11, as described in the editors' interview with Reverend Betsee Parker, who became head chaplain for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City and leader of the multifaith chaplaincy team at Ground Zero. The contributors are Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, Amy Bard, Herbert Basser, Santha Bhattacharji, William Chittick, Gary Ebersole, M. David Eckel, John Hawley, Gay Lynch, Jacob Olúpqnà (with Solá Ajíbádé), Betsee Parker, Kimberley Patton, Nehemia Polen, Kay Read, and Kallistos Ware.

Henry of Grosmont, first Duke of Lancaster, cousin and friend of Edward III, was a soldier, statesman, and diplomat. His Book of Holy Medicines of 1354, an astonishing composition by a secular nobleman, is a classic of penitential thinking and intense spirituality that has never been available in a full translation. Catherine Batt's sensitive and profoundly informed translation into modern English brings to life the work's allegorical account of the wounds of sin and its meditative processes of healing. Her annotations and substantial introduction place the text within the political, literary, and discursive networks of later fourteenth-century England and its multilingual culture, and they open up important new literary connections in England and on the continent, where Lancaster spent much of his career. His Book is now accessible to modern English-speaking readers as a classic of medieval spirituality and lay writing alongside the works of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich.