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We will be sending out a newsletter 3 to 4 times per year with information about new publications, any upcoming conference appearances, new developments on our website, and more.
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 needs your help, today. Since 1989, we have expanded the boundaries of our understanding of medieval literary traditions and cultures through our ever-growing collection of open access and affordable texts. Our new website and digital reader, launched in November 2024, have enhanced our long-standing goals to support groundbreaking scholarship, ensure access, and enable teaching and learning.
We have been able to do this through the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, whose grants were our source of funding for staff salaries. With our recent and sudden funding loss due to NEH grant terminations, our work is in jeopardy. If every person who uses our site donated just $10, we would be well on our way to being fully self-supported.
Please donate today: every dollar you give will go directly toward staff salaries, and will help us ensure that these texts remain accessible to readers around the world.
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.