Laura Kalas is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Swansea UniversityLaura Varnam is Lecturer in Old and Middle English Literature at University College, Oxford

'The essays gathered in the volume evince our growing understanding of the artistry that undergirds a text that was once considered important but possibly artless. It is this artistry, this sure sense of the dynamics of narrative, of voice, of social and religious conventions and culture, that holds the volume itself together, giving it the implicit unity a gifted author provides to her or his later readers....This is a good volume of essays with which to continue the process of exploration and the joys of discovery.'Lynn Staley, Harrington and Shirley Drake Professor of the Humanities, Colgate University, The Medieval Review

• Introduction: Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe in the twenty-first century – Laura Kalas and Laura Varnam Part I: Textual encounters1 Before Margery: The Book of Margery Kempe and its antecedents – Diane Watt 2 The intertextual dialogue and conversational theology of Mechthild of Hackeborn and Margery Kempe – Liz Herbert McAvoy and Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa 3 The prayers of Margery Kempe: a reassessment – Josephine A. Koster Part II: Internal encounters4 The Book of Margery Kempe: autobiography in the third person – Ruth Evans5 Margery Kempe as de-facement – Johannes Wolf6 Margery Kempe, oral history, and the value of intersubjectivity – Katherine J. Lewis7 ‘A booke of hyr felyngys’: exemplarity and Margery Kempe’s encounters of the heart – Laura VarnamPart III: Encountering the world8 Margery Kempe’s home town and worthy kin – Susan Maddock9 A women’s network in fifteenth-century Rome: Margery Kempe encounters ‘Margaret Florentyne’ – Anthony Bale and Daniela Giosuè10 Margery Kempe, racialised soundscapes, sonic warss and cosmopolitan Jerusalem – Dorothy Kim11 The materialisation of Book II: elements of Margery Kempe’s world – Laura KalasPart IV: Performative encounters12 Writing performed lives: Margery Kempe meets Marina Abramovic – Sarah Salih13 Recreating and reassessing Margery and Julian’s encounter – Tara WilliamsIndex