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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.
METS is a diverse, ever-growing collection of edited medieval texts. Our editions represent the medieval literary traditions and cultures that flourished in what is modern-day Britain and Ireland. It is committed to publishing affordable print and open access digital editions that are accessible to all.
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Julian of Norwich was one of the most notable and influential Christian mystics of fourteenth-century England, renowned for her theological writing detailing her visions of divinity. In May of 1373, Julian experienced a number of vivid, dynamic, and even frightening spiritual visions on what she thought would be her deathbed. Of the two versions of the text that were made—the earlier, shorter version, and the longer version, written twenty years after the event—Georgia Ronan Crampton’s edition focuses on the longer version, which contains far more of Julian’s analyses and meditations about her experience. Presenting the full-length longer version, passages from the shorter version, and an account of a visit by Julian’s fellow mystic Margery Kempe, Crampton’s edition is a must-have for any medieval literature classroom, offering scholars and students alike the chance to read of Julian’s visions in her own Middle English.