ABSTRACT
The burgeoning interest in Margery Kempe and her book in recent decades has tended to focus on her own unique brand of mysticism and the singular mode of its expression-the boisterous weepings and high-profile persona which characterized her piety. Also of common interest has been Margery' s apparent escape of family ties, her compulsive traveling, and her expressions of imitatio Christi, and imitatio Mariae. Some of these approaches have at least touched upon the theme of Margery' s sexuality,2 but what has not been fully examined is the extent to which Margery' s book and its account of her journey towards a realization of her holy vocation, although seemingly dependent upon an apparent rejection of orthodox female-gendered roles within society such as that of the wife, the mother and the sexual reprobate, is in fact predicated upon a sustained type of recontextualisation of the discourses associated with these roles in order to accommodate Margery' s call to the holy life.
