Abstract
While some critical scrutiny has been given to Kempe’s relationships with her male spiritual advisors, and the extent to which she relied on them to authorize her controversial piety, other scholars have paid close attention to the ways in which she framed her spirituality around her experiences as a mother. Some, most significantly Kathy Lavezzo, have focused not on biological relationships, but instead examined the importance of female same-sex bonding within the Book. Yet a gap remains within feminist scholarship on The Book of Margery Kempe: consideration of Kempe’s troubled, earthly (though not strictly or narrowly familial or spiritual) relationships with other women. In this essay I look at two examples of such marginalized female presences in The Book – Margery Kempe’s daughter-in-law and her maid—which appear in the thematically and structurally foregrounded accounts of her major overseas pilgrimages. My focus is, then, not on the women who love Margery Kempe, but on those who do not.