Fals flesch Food and the Embodied Piety of Margery Kempe
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2005-07
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New Medieval Literatures
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Oxford University Press
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School of Culture and Communication
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Raine, M. (2005). Fals flesch Food and the Embodied Piety of Margery Kempe. Scase, W (Ed.). Copeland, R (Ed.). Lawton, D (Ed.). New Medieval Literatures, (1), pp.101-126. Oxford University Press.
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Abstract
One of the most conspicuous ways in which the heightened religious experience of Margery Kempe is communicated to those around her is through the violation of certain norms of everyday bodily regulation: Margery weeps, howls, all but collapses in her contemplative ecstasies. The sheer inability to regulate her own physicality signifies piety in these instances. Yet this lack of regulation is, perhaps ironically, also a highly conformist gesture, as these losses of self-control signify Margery’s participation in a tradition of female affective piety. However, it is not only the flamboyant physicality of Margery’s piety that demonstrates the ambiguity of notions of control and its loss, and of conformity as distinct from singularity or individuality: other, more everyday forms of self-regulation are also intrinsic to communicating Margery’s exceptional spiritual experiences to her audiences.