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The Book of Margery Kempe set in the context of medieval medical discourse.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'sresponse 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. LAURA KALAS is a Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Swansea University.

Julia Ogilvy interviews twelve of the most notable Christian women of our time, exploring their disappointments, ambitions and hope for the future place of women in the Church.The role of women in the Christian Church has been the subject of heated debate in recent years. This July the Church of England's General Synod vote approving the ordination of women bishops announced a new era for women in the church, ushered in after almost 100 years of campaigning.In this powerful book, Julia Ogilvy provides a telling and at times shocking analysis of the situation today. The women - from the Dean of York and the Presiding Bishop in America to Helena Kennedy QC and Dr Elaine Storkey - share some of the pain, disappointment and hurt they have experienced and reflect on the impact of a patriarchal Church on the suffering of women across the world.Their stories are very different but they all share a remarkable faith, humility and determination to fulfil their own calling. Each one is an inspiration to women everywhere and provides a unique insight into the role of the leader in any profession.Contributors include: Lucy Winkett, Rose Hudson-Wilkin, Sheila Watson, Vivienne Faull, Jane Williams, Elaine Storkey, Sarah Coakley, Helena Kennedy, Alison Elliot, Tamsin Merchant, Katherine Jefferts Schori, and Chilton Knudsen.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1999Karma Lochrie demonstrates that women were associated not with the body but rather with the flesh, that disruptive aspect of body and soul which Augustine claimed was fissured with the Fall of Man. It is within this framework that she reads The Book of Margery Kempe, demonstrating the ways in which Kempe exploited the gendered ideologies of flesh and text through her controversial practices of writing, her inappropriate-seeming laughter, and the most notorious aspect of her mysticism, her'hysterical'weeping expressions of religious desire. Lochrie challenges prevailing scholarly assumptions of Kempe's illiteracy, her role in the writing of her book, her misunderstanding of mystical concepts, and the failure of her book to influence a reading community. In her work and her life, Kempe consistently crossed the barriers of those cultural taboos designed to exclude and silence her.Instead of viewing Kempe as marginal to the great mystical and literary traditions of the late Middle Ages, this study takes her seriously as a woman responding to the cultural constraints and exclusions of her time. Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh will be of interest to students and scholars of medieval studies, intellectual history, and feminist theory.