Interprets Kempe's economic metaphors as keys to Kempe's sense of how she liberated herself from marriage and acquired God's intimacy and grace. This line of argument intersects the biographical evidence that Aers supplies about Kempte's actual economic activity as a business woman.

Contains historical essays situating Kempe in various cultural context including her town of Lynn; heresy and dissent; political prophesy; saint-making; and mariage to Christ. See especially Isabel Davis, "Men and Margery: Negotiating Medieval Patriarchy."

Explores Margery's "marriage" to Christ.

Argues that Kempe engages in self-fashioning as a pious woman using public signs of her special relationship to Christ: weeping, wailing. Analyzes Kempe's affirmatve mysticism (as opposed to negative mysticism) and Kempe's self-defenses at her heresy trials.

Most interesting is when Harding discusses the complexities of Kempe's dictating her text to a Priest given sacerdotal celibacy and Margery's bodily expressions of her spirituality.

Performs close readings about how the content of The Book of Life reflects the domestic (maternal, spousal, etc.) obstacles that kept Margery from writing but equally how Kempe uses her domestic experience (as wife, mother, etc.) to frame her spiritual authority.

Close readings interpret Kempe's unnamed sin as sexual in nature; examine her pain in child labor; and argue, via Judith Butler's ideas on the performance of gender, that Margery enacts the roles of mother and wife (to which she clearly less than commits) in order to create for herself a socio-religious role and in order to insert herself as mother and wife into sacred history. Shows how a married woman can reinvent herself as holy.