Margery Kempe's Spiritual Medicine

<p>Margery Kempe's various illnesses mental spiritual and physical are a recurring theme in her <em>Book</em>. 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 <em>Book</em> itself: as a narrative of Kempe's own engagement with the medical paradigms of which she has previously been a passive subject.<br />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's response 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 <em>show</em> how she <em>feels</em>.<br /><br />LAURA KALAS is a Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Swansea University.</p>