Likely written in the late 1430s, The Book of Margery Kempe is a tale of spiritual awakening as remarkable for the literary traditions and conventions it invokes as for how it breaks with them. As a member of the powerful guild of the Holy Trinity in the prosperous East Anglian town of Bishop's Lynn, Margery Kempe wrote from a secure position within a culture her Book comes to criticize; the literary persona she adopts first reflects her urban merchant class and its concerns with profit, prestige, and conventional gender roles, then increasingly rejects them in her growing commitment to her spiritual vocation. Bearing the hallmarks of hagiography and mystical literature, yet presented as what volume editor Lynn Staley terms “medieval female sacred biography,” the Book of Margery Kempe presents a tale of radical reversal whose protagonist’s uniquely intense affective piety is instrumental in gaining her personal, financial, and spiritual autonomy.
