'The essays gathered in the volume evince our growing understanding of the artistry that undergirds a text that was once considered important but possibly artless. It is this artistry, this sure sense of the dynamics of narrative, of voice, of social and religious conventions and culture, that holds the volume itself together, giving it the implicit unity a gifted author provides to her or his later readers....This is a good volume of essays with which to continue the process of exploration and the joys of discovery.'
Lynn Staley, Harrington and Shirley Drake Professor of the Humanities, Colgate University, The Medieval Review

Introduction: Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe in the twenty-first century – Laura Kalas and Laura Varnam
Part I: Textual encounters
1 Before Margery: The Book of Margery Kempe and its antecedents – Diane Watt
2 The intertextual dialogue and conversational theology of Mechthild of Hackeborn and Margery Kempe – Liz Herbert McAvoy and Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa
3 The prayers of Margery Kempe: a reassessment – Josephine A. Koster
Part II: Internal encounters
4 The Book of Margery Kempe: autobiography in the third person – Ruth Evans
5 Margery Kempe as de-facement – Johannes Wolf
6 Margery Kempe, oral history, and the value of intersubjectivity – Katherine J. Lewis
7 ‘A booke of hyr felyngys’: exemplarity and Margery Kempe’s encounters of the heart – Laura Varnam
Part III: Encountering the world
8 Margery Kempe’s home town and worthy kin – Susan Maddock
9 A women’s network in fifteenth-century Rome: Margery Kempe encounters ‘Margaret Florentyne’ – Anthony Bale and Daniela Giosuè
10 Margery Kempe, racialised soundscapes, sonic warss and cosmopolitan Jerusalem – Dorothy Kim
11 The materialisation of Book II: elements of Margery Kempe’s world – Laura Kalas
Part IV: Performative encounters
12 Writing performed lives: Margery Kempe meets Marina Abramovic – Sarah Salih
13 Recreating and reassessing Margery and Julian’s encounter – Tara Williams
Index