Unlikely Matter

Abstract

In The Book of Margery Kempe, the protagonist shifts between identities and geographies as a nomadic subject, dispersed across compassionate responses to violence that unusually include a recognition of animal suffering. The Life of Christina the Astonishing also seizes on the nonhuman aspects of extreme affective experience as her bodily transformations participate in a process of becoming-animal. Both texts reflect a medieval fascination with the devotional body as a zone of closure and opening where transhuman and interspecies associations can be safely explored.