Publisher's Synopsis
The interdisciplinary study is devoted to the investigation of the tradition and text history, literary authorship and the narrative methods of mystical womens life and revelation literature of the late Middle Ages. The focus is on the Middle English Vitentext of Margery Kempe, which is widely discussed in English research. The aim of the work is to work out the literary nature and rhetoric of the Kempe vita in comparison with the feminine mysticism of the South German Dominican convents in order to open up a new perspective of analysis and understanding of the Kempe corpus handed down in handwriting and print. The results of the German-language research on women's mysticism form the basis of a narratologically oriented text indexing that directs the view to the literary narrative of the Kempe-Vita.
