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"Clad in Flesch and Blood": The Sartorial Body and Female Self-Fashioning in the Book of Margery Kempe

Abstract:This article examines how the engagement with textiles and textile-craft in The Book of Margery Kempe facilitates the performance of Margery's female religious identity. Drawing on the fundamental precepts of performance theory, the article responds to recent scholarly interest in the manifestations of material devotional culture and the performative body. It first maps out the charged theological significations of textiles and their subsequent transformative potential. Then, it examines how Margery finds an active tool in "fabrics of devotion" in the form of saintly relics, images, and garments themselves, and how Margery's adoption of white garb refashions her body in the image of a saintly matrilineage. It concludes that interaction with Bridgettine visual and material objects supplies Margery with a new Marian iconography, which allows her to perform a double imitatio, weaving together the thread of her own life into the rich tapestry of archetypal holy women.