The conference committee invites papers offering larger perspectives rather than work on particular individuals or texts, and that is what I propose to do via Kempe s book. For, if ever there was a book instantiating a new narrative of female empowerment, it is the Book of Margery Kempe . BMK engages all the central questions posed by the call for papers. It does so on three levels. This concerns the ways BMK has become the object of a torrent of critical and editorial work during the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Devices enable voices but according to different ideologies of what a female voice is.
And structures, such as trials and book production, assist and resist female public visibility. Since this is to be only a twenty-minute paper, I will give an overview of strains in BMK scholarship, particularly the idea of authorship, the literacy question, the attraction to autobiography, and the illness issue. Then I will focus on the long text s self-conscious moments of voice and visibility and recent scholarship related to these issues.