Since its rediscovery in 1934, the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe has develop into a canonical textual content for college students of medieval Christian mysticism and spirituality. Its writer was once a fifteenth-century English laywoman who, after the delivery of her first baby, skilled brilliant non secular visions and vowed to guide a deeply spiritual existence whereas ultimate a part of the secular international. After 20 years, Kempe started to compose with assistance from scribes a e-book of comfort, a kind of devotional writing present in past due medieval non secular tradition that taught readers how to define religious convenience and the way to consider approximately one's non secular lifestyles. In Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader, Rebecca Krug indicates how and why Kempe wrote her booklet, arguing that during her engagement with written tradition she came across a wish to event non secular convenience and to have interaction with fellow believers who additionally sought to stay lives of excessive emotional engagement.

An not going candidate for authorship within the past due medieval interval given her gender and absence of formal schooling, Kempe wrote her Book as a revisionary act. Krug exhibits how the Book reinterprets ideas from overdue medieval devotional writing (comfort, melancholy, disgrace, worry, and loneliness) in its seek to create a religious neighborhood that reaches out to and comprises Kempe, her acquaintances, relations, advisers, and capability readers. Krug bargains a clean research of the Book as a written paintings and attracts awareness to the significance of studying, revision, and collaboration for figuring out either Kempe’s specific determination to write down and the social stipulations of overdue medieval women’s authorship.