The starting point for Rebecca Krug's Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader is a seemingly straightforward question: “Why did Margery Kempe write her Book?” (vii). In order even to ask that question, however, Krug must depart from the critical tradition that sees Kempe's Book as a generic instance of either vernacular theology or late-medieval devotional culture more broadly. This is not to say that Krug's project is at odds with either of those approaches, and she draws on them to set Kempe's work within a rich context of contemporary devotional material. Her goal, however, is to use the syllabus of devotional writings to which Kempe refers to illuminate the Book rather than vice versa. Krug thus compares Kempe's Book to contemporary works of spiritual consolation, such as Rolle's Fire of Love, Hilton's Scale of Perfection, and the anonymous Prickynge of Love with an eye to what is specific to the Book rather than to what is commonplace. That is, she sets out to isolate the elements of Kempe's text that do not derive from the wider devotional tradition—and thus to identify what Kempe may have felt was lacking in that tradition and sought to supply through her own act of composition.

The most important difference Krug identifies pertains not to doctrine but to what we might call emotional labor. Late-medieval devotional texts are certainly not shy about telling their readers what to feel. A spiritually ambitious reader of Hilton's Scale, for instance, must think of herself as a “wrecche, outcaste and refuse of alle men and women” while at the same time maintaining a joyful and steadfast hope in god's mercy (36). Generally speaking, however, such texts offer their readers little advice about how to achieve—much less maintain—this complex emotional state. Although Kempe's teaching is doctrinally indistinguishable from Hilton's, she departs from him—Krug argues—by recognizing and seeking to facilitate the emotional work such directives require. To begin with, how does one understand oneself as refuse without lapsing into wanhope? Kempe's Book counsels its readers to focus their attention on future, perfected versions of themselves rather than present, abjected ones. More broadly, it takes seriously the messy lived experience of emotion instead of contenting itself with tidy prescriptions. Krug finds that, in a leveling of the usual hierarchical relationship between author and reader, Kempe offers her own long-term struggles with despair and other negative emotions as models for her readers. Krug thus classifies the Book not as vernacular theology but as self-help. Although she does not put it quite this way, in her reading, Kempe's Book becomes a kind of disciplinary apparatus, a device for developing complex emotional skills rather than transmitting doctrinal content.

Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader is divided into five chapters, each named after a specific emotion: comfort, despair, shame, fear, and loneliness. Given this ordinatio, one might expect Krug to draw heavily on recent scholarship on the history of emotions. Although she is clearly familiar with this body of work, her emphasis lies elsewhere. Indeed, Krug stands out for her attention to the formal dimension of the Book, not just to what it says but to how it says it. This commitment to examining Kempe's rhetorical or literary style dovetails nicely with Krug's emphasis on emotion, since rhetoric is, at heart, a form of emotional management. As an author, Kempe chooses to make her point in one way rather than another in order to elicit a particular emotional response from her audience—although in this case the emotion is almost an end in itself rather than a means of persuasion. Krug's sensitive close readings bring this relatively neglected formal dimension of Kempe's work to the fore with consistently productive results.

The other methodology upon which Krug draws, also to good effect, is the history of reading. In this respect, her present book builds upon her earlier work, above all Reading Families: Women's Literate Practice in Late Medieval England (Cornell University Press, 2002). Approaching the Book from this angle allows Krug to appreciate the momentousness of Kempe's decision to write, given both her gender and her need for a series of scribes and collaborators—and thus to bring into focus the lacunae in the existing tradition that spurred her to do so. It also allows her to give due attention to the collaborative aspects of Kempe's work, which themselves constitute a model for managing negative emotions. The “lonely reader” of Krug's title refers both to Kempe herself, whose devotion isolates her from many forms of human community, and to her imagined reader, who does not find the kind of comfort she needs in other consolatory writings. Kempe's practice of writing assuages that loneliness by creating a community of kindred spirits. Krug proposes that, after treating the ending of the first book as if it were final, Kempe and her scribe decided to write a second book because they missed their collaboration. More broadly, she finds the Book as a whole seeks to stop “the perpetual loss of friends and companions” Kempe suffers “by making permanent Kempe's interaction with her readers through the written account of her life” (174). On the level of macrocosm as well as microcosm, then, Kempe's Book teaches the craft of emotional management.

One weakness of Krug's approach is that, by cutting across Kempe's ordinatio to devote a separate chapter to each emotion, it can obscure the interplay of emotions presented in close proximity to each other and otherwise makes it difficult to attend to local rhetorical effects. This is a mere quibble, however, when weighed against Krug's learned and compelling answer to the question, “Why did Margery Kempe write?” Her book will likely change the way all of us think and talk about Kempe's Book.