A second edition of Lynn Staley’s celebrated 2001 Norton translation of The Book of Margery Kempe offers an opportunity to incorporate a quarter of a century of new research on Kempe. What changes have been made? The translation remains the same, with some minor additions to the notes and glosses. The choice of texts in the “Contexts” section remains the same, with minor variations in the material. The selective Bibliography has been only very slightly updated. The substantial changes are to the “Introduction,” which has been completely rewritten, and to the “Criticism” section, to which four new extracts have been added.
The 2026 “Introduction,” which is longer than that of 2001, uses thematic subheadings to indicate Staley’s emphases: “Making The Book of Margery Kempe”; “Artistry”; “Foundations of Community: King’s Lynn and St. Nicholas’s Chapel”; “Foundations of Community: Pilgrims and Piety Beyond King’s Lynn”; “Gender, Orthodoxy, and Community.” For Staley, Kempe is a remarkable—but not unusual—example of late medieval, female, lay piety, who created a consciously crafted narrative of her spiritual experiences, who is best understood in relation both to her East Anglian community in Lynn (then Bishop’s Lynn) and to the mercantile and spiritual networks of fifteenth-century England and Continental Europe, and whose Book captures the tensions of “a period of conflict and social change” (vii). As in the 2001 edition, Staley refers to the Book’s author as Kempe and its protagonist as Margery (this distinction is one of Staley’s important contributions to Kempe scholarship) but she now draws explicit attention to that distinction (xii).
The “Making” section sees the writing of the Book as collaborative but puts Margery at the center: the treatise that we read, copied by Salthows, is a second copy of “the true book, which exists in Margery oris Margery and is copied by the first scribe, then refined by the second” (xi). The Book is presented here as an essence that pre-exists its being written, inside a character called “Margery,” and yet which is at the same time identical with that character. This idea is repeated elsewhere, albeit in language that confusingly—given the distinction that Staley makes between Kempe and Margery—conflates the protagonist with the author: “The life she lives as the written text is also the life she constructs for her writer” (xxii). In “Artistry” there is more emphasis than in the 2001 edition on formal aspects of the text, such as third-person narration and the Book’s non-linear chronology (xiii). “Foundations of Community: King’s Lynn and St. Nicholas’s Chapel” contains new material, including photographs of the late thirteenth/early fourteenth-century south porch door of St. Nicholas’s Chapel, which was commissioned by the newly rich merchants in the north end of the town, and which inter alia includes a carving of a barefoot woman reading (reproduced on the cover of the edition). Staley argues that St. Nicholas’s chapel “is a snapshot of the complexities of a new social reality that emerged from about 1370 to 1419” (xv), when the chapel was finished. Kempe, as someone from a long-established, high-status family, disapproved of the upstart merchants’ desire to make the chapel of St. Nicholas a church so that it would have its own parish (xiv), but Staley points out that the merchants and their wives that commissioned and paid for the carvings laid great emphasis on the kind of female-centered piety and power that Kempe championed (xvii).
The following section, on Kempe’s pilgrimages around England, and to Germany, Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela, argues that Kempe also belonged to a transnational community that mingled the mercantile, the practical, and the spiritual (xx). Staley’s discussion of “Margery’s tears” (xxi-xxii) in this section does not sufficiently distinguish between tears of devotion and Kempe’s boisterous bellowing, which began in Jerusalem and which punctuates her life at often inopportune moments. The final brief section on “Gender, Orthodoxy, and Community” deals with how Kempe negotiates being a woman who is sometimes perceived as transgressive, but who was also “cherished and protected by some very distinguished churchmen” (xxiv). Staley is keen to emphasize that Kempe is not “odd” for being “a practicing Christian” (xxii)—she is thoroughly orthodox—but she is set apart because she is a married woman of some social status within her community (xxii), whose disruptive behavior contradicts—and critiques—social norms. Nevertheless, as Staley insists, “the Book presents Margery as an authorized text” (xxiv).
The choice of texts in the “Contexts” section remains the same as in the 2001 edition, but with some slight variations: extracts from Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions, the anonymous Meditations on the Life of Christ (the meditation on Jesus’s descent into Hell has been cut), Julian of Norwich’s Showings (from Denise Baker’s 2005 Norton edition), the Middle English translation and digest of St Bridget’s Revelations (from Julia Bolton Holloway’s edition; most of the section on Mary as an example of the contemplative life has been cut, so that the focus is now on Martha as an example of the active life), and Jacques de Vitry’s Life ofthe Beguine saint Marie d’Oignies (which now includes two chapters from the account of Marie’s chaste marriage and a chapter on her tears). Brief headnotes explain their importance as contexts for the Book.
The “Criticism” section contains four new extracts from more recent work on the Book: from Jonathan Hsy’s 2011 chapter on multilingualism in the Book, from Rebecca Krug’s Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader (2017) on emotions and linguistic patterning, and from chapters by Laura Varnam (on the heart as a locus for strong feelings) and Laura Kalas (on the presence of the natural world) from their 2021 edited volume, Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe. To make space (I assume) for these four, the extracts from Staley and David Aers that were in the first edition have gone, and some of the extracts that appeared in 2001 have been shortened: those by Clarissa Atkinson (“Female Sanctity”), Karma Lochrie (“From Utterance to Text”), Kathleen Ashley, Gail McMurray Gibson, and Caroline Walker Bynum. Sarah Beckwith’s extract on imitatio Christi and Nicholas Watson’s on Arundel’s Constitutions are intact. I regret that an extract from Sarah Salih’s excellent chapter on Kempe and virginity (in her 2001 monograph Versions of Virginity) is not included. None of the critical works has an explanatory headnote.
Disappointingly, the selective Bibliography, which is just under four pages long, does not include much recent work. I understand Staley’s desire to select work that reflects her critical emphases, and I understand the constraints on space that the publisher probably demanded, but there are only twelve entries for work published since (and including) 2001, out of the 360 that I found for that twenty-five-year period on the MLA International Bibliography. The significant omissions are too numerous to mention but I might have included Corinne Saunders and Diane Watt (eds.), Women and Medieval Literary Culture: From the Early Middle Ages to the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Laura Kalas, Margery Kempe’s Spiritual Medicine: Suffering, Transformation and the Life-course (D. S. Brewer, 2020), David Wallace’s chapter on Kempe in Strong Women (Oxford University Press, 2011), and John H. Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis (eds.), A Companion to The Book of Margery Kempe (D. S. Brewer, 2004). Arguably, it would have been useful to the student users of this edition to have included work by scholars that consider the Book not only as a work of its time but also as a resource for generating new meanings today, such as Brenna Duperron, “Ghostly Consciousness in The Book of Margery Kempe,” English Language Notes 58, no. 2 (2020): 121-135, or Yea Jung Park, “The Embarrassments of Confession: Reading Margery Kempe Today,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 11, nos. 2-3 (2020): 253-63. One of the two endorsements on the back cover, by the noted trans scholar M. W Bychowski, portrays Kempe appreciatively as “a dysphoric woman gendered as both mother and virgin, a mad woman and a brilliant maker...a speaker of queer nonsense and mystical truth.” These are certainly some of the reasons why this text is a classroom winner. However, none of the critical extracts or new entries in the 2026 Bibliography reads Kempe as “dysphoric,” “mad,” or “queer.” Two items that are referred to in the Introduction (ix-x, xxiv) are not listed in the Bibliography: Sebastian Sobecki’s 2015 Studies in the Age of Chaucer article that confirms the historicity of Kempe’s son’s visit to Lynn, and Anthony Bale and Daniela Giosuè’s identification of the woman that Kempe first encounters in Assisi as the wealthy Florentine widow Margherita degli Alberti. The volume has been carefully proofread. I noted only three typos: a repetition of “the” (154, n. 7), Hirsch for Hirsh (319), and Hitchison for Hutchison (320). There is no index.
The translation, rightly, is the centerpiece of this volume. Its glosses and notes are still conveniently at the bottom of the page. There are slightly more glosses: for example, caitif (3), bull [“papal edict”] (48), and mean [“intermediary”] (167) are now glossed. The reader is now explicitly directed in the footnotes to consult “The Kempe Lexicon” (xxxi-xxxii), also in the first edition, which provides a list of 22 words in the text that are not translated, such as creature, ghostly and dalliance. The notes have hardly changed. Christ’s words “‘Ego sum’” are now identified as “Latin” (151), the note in Ch. 61 that explains that St. James’s chapel in Lynn is a chapel of ease now adds, not entirely helpfully, that this means it was “a church building” in St. Margaret’s parish (119), and in one or two places readers are now directed to a particular extract in the “Contexts” section of the edition that explains Kempe’s sources. One small issue with this cross-referencing is that a note explains that Kempe’s extrabiblical account of the Passion is indebted to Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (149), directing the reader to an extract (214-19) which is not in fact from Love’s Middle English translation of the anonymous Latin Meditationes Vitae Christi but rather from a modern translation. This is not a big deal, since the source is essentially the same, but it raises a question about Kempe’s Latinity: did she know this account from Love or from the original Latin?
The translation is in competition with several others, notably Barry Windeatt’s and Bale’s. Staley’s, as readers of her 2001 edition already know, stays close to the Middle English: “Here begins a short treatise and a comfortable for sinful wretches, wherein they may have great solace and comfort for themselves and understand the high and unspeakable mercy of our sovereign Savior Christ Jesus...” (3). Staley’s “foreignizing” technique (to use Lawrence Venuti’s somewhat overworked term) is evident in both the syntax—“a short treatise and a comfortable”—and the lexis: “comforting” for “comfortable.” John’s words to Margery in Book One, Ch. 11—“‘Margery, if there came a man with a sword and would smite off my head unless I should common naturally with you as I have done before, tell me the truth from your conscience—for you say you will not lie—whether would you suffer my head to be smote off or else suffer me to meddle with you again, as I did at one time’” (20)—require the reader to look up the verbs common and meddle in Staley’s “Kempe Lexicon,” and thus to be reminded that Middle English has a distinctive sexual vocabulary. I like this foreignizing. Moreover, although Staley would never put it this way, after Kempe’s text has been placed in its historical and social and global context, as Staley so admirably does, something foreign remains in the Book, something that goes on provoking readers to return to it and to wrestle with it, something that resists domestication. Archives are not transparent: they do not speak a single truth.