22 ACUMEN • SPRING 2025 Olivia Mathers parlays a passion for the Middle Ages into her doctoral work in English literature by incorporating divergent sources. From Margery Kempe (1373-1440) an obscure 14th century Christian mystic to Dungeons and Dragons, video game “Pentiment” and “The Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien, Mathers gathers and weaves historical threads to explore and understand medieval history’s resonance in modern culture. Mathers has a penchant for late medieval English literature and fantasy games. Pentiment is an historical narrative adventure role-playing video game set during the Middle Ages. It’s another rich source for Mathers’s work and imagination. “It [the medieval period] is not the most popular academic English study, and I think I’m drawn to that because it’s less saturated,” said Mathers, a second year doctoral student. Her research centers on The Book of Margery Kempe, considered the first autobiography written in English. The text recounts Kempe’s domestic life, holy pilgrimages—unthinkable for a woman of her time—and divine visions, including conversations with God, Jesus, and other religious figures during the height of Roman Catholic influence in medieval Britain. Mathers views her research and scholarly writing as a creative endeavor where she can explore interests. During a roundtable discussion at the International Congress on Medieval Studies MELINDA RIZZO COURTESY OF OBSIDIAN ENTERTAINMENT Exploring the Middle Ages in the Modern World Doctoral student Olivia Mathers uncovers medieval history’s surprising connections to contemporary culture through literature, gaming, and fantasy in May, Mathers will present a paper anchored by Kempe and her unconventional views around virginity and medieval culture. The conference is hosted by Western Michigan University. “Participating in a panel like this will help me find what people are interested in and how it’s depicted in this modern moment,” she said. “Kempe was a wife and a business woman. She had 14 children and she dictated this autobiography about her spiritual conversion,” Mathers explained. Kempe’s life was extraordinary for its rejection of societal norms. Born into an upper-class family, she married and had her children before experiencing a spiritual conversion. Following this transformation, Kempe declared herself “reborn as a virgin,” convincing her husband to take a vow of chastity—a radical demand for a woman of her era. “I’m trying to understand how Kempe saw herself as a virgin based on how people around her saw her and what they knew about her,” Mathers explained. “As a woman you could either be a virgin, a wife or a widow and those were the three ways you could be engaged and still get into heaven. Kempe tries to deal with this situation with an unusual approach,” Mathers explained. Kempe was a disrupter with a regular habit of crying, weeping and screaming—distasteful and objectionable behavior to those around her. “The people around her were pretty annoyed by her most of the time because she…saw herself as a saint-like figure and was obvious about it with her behavior,” Mathers said. While Mathers’s fascination with Kempe is recent—and began last year during a Lehigh course about community, identity, and non-conformity— she said Kempe’s life and her mission stands apart, making her unique. Medieval saints had a stringent set of expectations and Kempe did not fit the stereotype, and she did not let cultural constraints stop her, Mathers said.
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