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There are many interesting questions about the place of emotion in the academy and the ways in which researchers in the humanities identify with the people they study. At a in Oxford about the medieval mystic Margery Kempe, Rachel Moss ¨C a lecturer in late medieval history at the university ¨C decided to address them head?on.

Because The Book of Margery Kempe is a rare example of an autobiographical text by a lay medieval woman, it has attracted increasing interest among feminist and other scholars, as shown by the recent creation of the , which organised the Oxford conference. Moss¡¯ presentation was titled ¡°Falling in Love and Crying: Academic Culture and What Margery Can Teach Us¡±. She opened by admitting, ¡°Margery is a character I found faintly embarrassing ¨C if intriguing ¨C as an undergraduate, and of whom I¡¯ve grown ever-fonder as the years have passed.¡±

Part of the problem was ¡°Margery¡¯s fangirlish passion for Jesus and propensity to ugly-cry at the drop of a hat¡±, which the younger Moss (like many before her) tended to ¡°dismiss as immature and irrational¡±. Yet she now sees her own attitude as ¡°a reaction against the way women are caricatured, and like many young women I thought the antidote to that was to be rational, impartial, objective¡±. Perhaps, instead, Kempe could provide ¡°inspiration for a radical reimagining of what it means to be a modern-day academic, one that centres our embodied existence, recognises and celebrates our shared human vulnerabilities, and isn¡¯t afraid to shed a few tears¡±.

In developing her argument, Moss drew on an experience of illness when she had ¡°cried the kind of gut-wrenching tears that I think of now when I read about Margery weeping her heart fit to burst¡±. When she was unable to carry out her examiner¡¯s duties, she ¡°felt guilty for dumping extra work on my colleagues, especially since I was ¨C I hope accidentally ¨C cc¡¯d into a thread where much stress over reassigning my marking was expressed¡±. When she found herself spitting blood in the dorm room of a conference and was forced to take sick leave, she ¡°still felt some shame about needing time off¡±.

All this, suggested Moss, was a reflection of an academic environment that ¡°can not only ignore its employees¡¯ lived ¨C embodied ¨C realities, but, even worse, make us feel we need to apologise for them¡±. Yet the truth, of course, is that when we go to work in laboratories and seminar rooms, ¡°we don¡¯t stop being human and become employees. We fall in love. We fall out of love. We make friends, and sometimes enemies. We cry: both because of things that happen at work, and because of things that are happening outside work.¡± Whether or not we need Margery Kempe to help us understand this, taking it seriously would be an important step towards ¡°building a better, kinder, more honest academy¡±.