Feminist Approaches to Middle English Religious Writing: The Cases of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich

Feminist study of Middle English religious writings is a relatively new field, but it is a rich and well‐developed one. Although the work of such pioneers as Eileen Edna Power set the stage in the early twentieth century, feminist scholarship of the corpus of medieval religious texts in English only emerged as a truly vibrant area of inquiry in the past twenty years. Indeed, the entry of such figures as Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich into the canon, marked iconically by their entries into the Norton Anthology of British Literature in 1986 and 1993 respectively, suggests at once how recent a scholarly development such work is and how strong an influence such scholarship has had on the study of Middle English literature. Using the cases of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich as test cases, this essay explores the key debates that have driven and shaped feminist scholarship on Middle English religious texts over the past two decades, and it explores newly emergent trends. It examines the impact of psychoanalytic criticism on medieval feminist scholarship and interrogates the contributions made by scholars who embrace French feminist approaches. It addresses the paradigm shifts enacted by the ground‐breaking work of Caroline Walker Bynum as well as the questions concerning gender and essentialism raised by her work. The importance of New Historicism in the field is also a key concern in the essay, as are new takes on historicist research, especially the work of scholars who are rethinking questions of historical periodization.