newspapers seized on the story of the unearthed treasure. In 1934, among news of Nazi restrictions and Canadian fires, the manuscript caught the public imagination. The Evening Standard described its contents as ‘certainly queer, even for a queer age’.5 But what was this book and who is the queer woman at the heart of it?6 Now known as The Book of Margery Kempe, since its discovery in the 1930s the text has become something of a superstar in the world of medieval studies;
