The Medieval Works and Lives of Margery Kempe and Alijt Bake: Social Exclusion and Social Networks”

Dr. Diana Denissen (University of Lausanne, Switzerland) will discuss two major late medieval examples of female life writing: the Middle English text The Book of Margery Kempe and Alijt Bake’s Middle Dutch Boecxken van mijn beghin ende voortganck (‘Book on my Beginnings and Progress’). Due to language boundaries, scholarly interest in the interconnections between Margery Kempe’s Book and Alijt Bake’s Boecxken is still in its early stages and deserves more attention. She will elaborate on the interchange between social exclusion and charismatic power as a driving force behind the narratives of both women. Second, she will explore Bake’s and Kempe’s encounters with two female recluses (the anchoress Julian of Norwich and an unnamed anchoress from Utrecht) and investigate how intricate friendship networks function as a window to a wide variety of late medieval (female) spiritualities in both texts.