Disease of Virgins: Green Sickness, Chlorosis and the Problems of Puberty by Helen King (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Spiritual Development of a Medieval Woman: The Book of Margery Kempe
The Spiritual Development of a Medieval Woman: The Book of Margery Kempe, 2022
Living an ordinary life until her experience of childbirth, Margery Kempe turned into a female mystic who devotedly dedicated her life to God. Despite her illiteracy, she was able to tell her own life story by focusing on her experience as a female mystic in the medieval society. As an account of her visions of Christ, her autobiographical work, The Book of Margery Kempe, written by two male scribes, depicts Margery’s spiritual development tinged with various details about the life of a medieval woman in the patriarchal society. Making a spiritual career for herself, Margery resisted the restrictive norms of her society and empowered herself through her book. This paper aims to bring the figure of Margery Kempe into focus as an ordinary medieval woman, a female mystic and a pilgrim in reference to her life story narrated in The Book of Margery Kempe.
Margery Kempe and the Virgin Martyrs.
demonstrated through physical signifiers such as the wearing of white clothes and holy tears. I argue that it is through such strategies that Margery deliberately aligned herself with the virgin martyrs both in the minds of those she encountered and in the response of her readers to her text even today. In the third and final section I look at the ways in which Margery alters the categories of virginity and martyrdom and thereby creates a new model of both. She must do so since she is neither a physical virgin nor facing the imminent death of a martyr at the hands of a tyrant as she repeatedly makes clear throughout her Book. Indeed, Margery directly challenges the narrow confines of female spirituality she finds in both Bokenham and Capgrave. That is, she relocates physical virginity from a matter of anatomy to the spiritual realm, so that even after a rumbustious sex life and multiple birth she remains a virgin. Similarly her martyrdom is white and concerns the abiding and intimate love she has for God and the experience of God's love for her. It is not the red martyrdom of the arena and neither does she desire or expect it, for the mutual love she finds in God immunises against it.
Preaching Mysticism from the Margins: A Queer Analysis of Margery Kempe
2020
The landscape of the European Middle Ages presents an explicitly gendered and social homogeneity, but this is not to say that there were not figures who defied communal expectations. While drawing on scholarly research surrounding gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages, I argue that we can and should examine these deviating figures through both a historical and contemporary understanding of the term “queer,” with consideration to the multitude of identities the term encompasses. This paper pays particular at- tention to the narrative of 15th-century Christian mystic Margery Kempe. The Book of Margery Kempe traces her journey as a mystic and prophet and the discord between her and several people and institutions. By applying a broad understanding of queerness to Kempe’s character, we see how Kempe’s identity as “this creature” becomes both the cause of her social exile and a tool to legitimize herself
Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2020
In fifteenth century England, information about the natural and supernatural worlds came to be broadly distributed in texts that circulated well beyond the institutional contexts in which this knowledge was first produced. Vernacular texts that deal with natural philosophy, medicine, and science, alongside a range of religious topics, were created in record numbers for a widening audience. Many of these testify to intensified interest in all aspects of the human body. Religious works written by, about, and for women participate in this ferment of ideas and information, crossing the boundaries between secular and transcendent themes and concerns. Because religious women were understood to have a special relationship to forms of physical piety, their vitae served as important vehicles for the production and dissemination of thinking about corporeality.
Illiterate Memory and Spiritual Experience: Margery Kempe, The Liturgy, and the “Woman in the Crowd”
2006
When Archbishop Bowet’s monks interrogated Margery Kempe in 1417, her Book tells us she placed her public religious testimony under the pope’s control and compared herself with Luke’s mulier de turba, the “woman in the crowd” with a boisterous voice.1 This passage has been examined frequently for evidence of medieval constructions of gender and the Church’s enforcement of orthodoxy against the threat of Lollardy.2 As one of Margery’s longest examples of her debating style, it may help us understand the tension between a literate elite and the illiterate English populace shortly before the introduction of mass-produced printed books and vastly increased vernacular literacy. Margery’s specific use of that Lukan passage also could help us understand how her spiritual consciousness affected the mnemonic process by which she retrieved the passage, whether to resist accusers or to construct the Book.
Virginity Matters: Negotiations of Identity in _The Book of Margery Kempe_
Mawared موارد (مجلة كلية الاداب والعلوم الانسانية بسوسة), 2016
Virginity is not normally compatible with marriage. Nor is the virgin usually able to reclaim premarital chastity—except at the spiritual level, like a saint. Like a virgin, Margery Kempe goes through a personal religious experience outside officially charted venues of devotion to regain her chastity in a community where virginity was physiologically recognised and institutionally regulated. Listening for religious guidance, she sees divine truth in the private pursuit of piety. I argue that the female mystic finds a measure of safety in the non-gendered status of the virgin, and yet develops a resilient sense of identity which enables her to bypass antagonism and negotiate her way to virginal cleanness. Keywords: Christianity – mysticism – alienation – virginity – negotiation – autobiography