![]() ![]() When rediscovered in 1934, the Book proved startlingly different from the pamphlet of extracts printed by Wynkyn de Worde ( c.1501, STC 14924), reprinted by Henry Pepwell as one of seven mystical treatises in The Cell of Self-Knowledge (1521, STC 20972). The anxieties and risks of Kempe’s book have coloured readers’ perceptions, sometimes evoking unease. Read as an inner life, it is newly animated. ![]() 2 The Book is shaped by the struggle to discern the cause and meaning of such experience, and the challenge to interpret and convey it. ‘Wondirful revelacyons’, the moving of the soul through visionary experience, are the subject of Kempe’s narrative. Its powerful affect has surprised, compelled and alienated its readers. It is a book of feeling, shaped by but also startlingly different from the books Kempe knew. The Book of Margery Kempe speaks in unique ways to the exploration of inner lives, as well as to Boffey’s interests in the intellectual contexts of books. 1 Boffey’s recent research has extended her seminal work on the fifteenth century to chronicle and life-writing. Can lived inner experience also speak across the centuries? Julia Boffey describes evocatively ‘the difficulty of writing about individual inner lives without many of the written sources available for more recent periods’ yet, she suggests, ‘the pendulum may be swinging the other way’. T he material and literary worlds of the medieval period remain richly alive in the twenty-first century. ![]()
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