Sara Gorman

Andrew W. Mellon Undergraduate Fellow in the Humanities

20062007 Forum on Travel

Sara Gorman

English, Psychology

College '07

“Sche knelyd upon hir kneys, hir boke in hir hand”: Manuscript Travel, Devotional Pedagogy, and the Textual Communities of The Book of Margery Kemp

The Book of Margery Kempe, a fifteenth-century mystical work written by an illiterate lay woman from King’s Lynn, has often been considered a generic anomaly. This project proposes that the transmission that the manuscript’s marginalia suggests indicates that Margery Kempe’s Book should be taken as a piece of devotional pedagogy inscribed in a community of similar manuscripts.In anticipating the travel of the manuscript, both within and outside the monastery walls, the monastic annotators associate the Book with particular manuscript communities in late medieval England.