MARGERY KEMPE: A MIXED LIFE. By AnthonyBale. London: Reaktion Books, 2021. Pp. 248. Hardcover.

Bale's volume revisits the life of a fascinating and enigmatic medieval English woman, Margery Kempe. Essentially, his book requires the reader to navigate between three different lives: the 15th-century Margery Kempe, the sketch presented in The Book of Margery Kempe, and Bale's own portrait. He accomplishes this seamlessly. Bale's design is to situate Kempe within her late medieval geographical, theological, and broader cultural context. He achieves this task smoothly and effectively as one gains a greater sense of 15th-century England, Europe, and the Holy Land, contemporaries such as Julian of Norwich, and movements such as Devotio moderna and the Lollards that intersected with and swirled around Kempe's active, yet contemplative, life. Such a life was “mixed,” as the subtitle indicates, in that it “bridged the sacred and the secular.” And Kempe's complexities abound. Any reader of The Book of Margery Kempe—an autobiographical work by a self-professed illiterate—comes away with a strong sense of her powerful emotional life, which she did little to hide in her life or her Book. Bale leans into this theme, devoting an entire chapter to personal and theological assessment. Additionally, Bale delicately balances analysis of Kempe's intense devotion and pilgrimages with her persistent social competition and need to be admired through her style, evidence of the many tensions in her life. Bale rounds out his study with a nice summary of the unusual manuscript tradition of The Book of Margery Kempe—accidentally rediscovered in 1934 during a game of ping pong!—while updating the reader on modern assessments of both Kempe the person and the Book. The present work will be of interest to scholars and nonscholars alike, and even a reader unacquainted with Kempe's life or Book will profit from Bale's enjoyable volume.