University of Calgary

English 609 Topic 54 - Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich in their Medieval Context

Winter 2010
Instructor:  Dr. Jacqueline Jenkins
jenkinsj [at] ucalgary [dot] ca 
Friday 10:00-12:30

Course Description:

This course will consider the works of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, the two known women writers in Middle English. We will frame our reading of The Book of Margery Kempe and A Revelation of Love with an examination of a wide selection of  contemporary documents and texts in order to investigate features of the writers' late medieval context.  The supplementary readings will be drawn from the following intersecting areas of research:

  • their social and religious histories, that is, Kempe and Julian as women with specific and fraught relationships to late medieval authority;
  • the lively textual community of which they are a part, that is, Kempe and Julian as inhabitants and participants in the flourishing literary community of East Anglia, home also to writers such as John Lydgate, John Capgrave, and Osbern Bokenham;
  • their literary activities, that is, their individual engagements with a range of devotional writing which both reflects and shapes their identities as devout subjects and influences their own literary work;
  • the spatiality of their lives, that is, the particularly important, and occasionally spectacular, relationships to space experienced by Kempe, the wandering pilgrim, and Julian, the anchoress;
  • their place in the larger picture of women's literary activity, for despite the prominence of their reputations now, Kempe and Julian were only two of the many women who, through translation or compilation or patronage, contributed to the late medieval textual culture.

 

Course requirements will include presentations on class readings, the preparation of seminar papers, and a final research essay. All medieval texts will be in Middle English, but the proposed editions are designed for broad student use, so even students with very little Middle English should find the readings accessible.

Proposed Text List:

The Book of Margery Kempe: the Annotated Edition.  Ed. Barry Windeatt. Library of Medieval Women. D.S. Brewer, 2004.

The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love.  Eds. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins.  Penn State Press, 2006.

Additional texts may be announced before the class begins. Many of the readings will be provided in a photocopy package.