Encountering “The Book of Margery Kempe.” Ed. Laura Kalas and Laura Varnam (Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture). Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021.

Since its discovery, when it leapt out of a country house cupboard in the 1930s to meet a group of young people playing Ping-Pong, The Book of Margery Kempe has sought encounters. Defying genre, the Book chronicles the travels, trials, and boisterous devotion of visionary, mystic, pilgrim, and devotional influencer Margery Kempe (1373–after 1439), a laywoman from the urban mercantile milieu of Lynn, Norfolk. Critical interest in the Book has burgeoned in the past three decades, with the Book being canonized in anthologies and on reading lists. Harnessing the many denotations and connotations of “encounter”, Encountering “The Book of Margery Kempe” breaks new ground by favouring abundant interdisciplinarity, expanding theoretical horizons, and situating the Book in the global Middle Ages. Embracing the Book’s resistance to categorization, it heeds Carolyn Dinshaw’s oft-repeated call for “touching the past” in order to build a more inclusive, collaborative academic future and unveil how each temporality is shot through with other temporalities. I have been eagerly awaiting the publication of this volume since its genesis, the landmark “Margery Kempe Studies in the Twenty-First Century” conference, organized in 2018 by the editors, Laura Kalas and Laura Varnam, both of whom have published extensively on the Book.