Somewhere in the space beyond Margery Kempe's final prayer to her adopted children of the world is her physical death: silent, invisible, and beyond the margins of the Book. The absence of a real-death narrative enables a paradoxical permanence, a strategic drifting into the spiritual ether. The final prayer that calls for the salvation of the souls of all mankind is the last time that we hear Kempe's voice and an ultimate act of surrogacy: a call, in her extreme old age, for the spiritual work of her lifetime to be utilised and for her fruitfulness to be efficacious even beyond the grave. How fitting, then, that Kempe's final utterance is a prayer for the world: unconcerned with her own bodily decrepitude her disembodied voice becomes a universal wisdom removed from the confines of her pain-filled body and left to resonate in the realm beyond the leaves of her manuscript. As her corporeality finally fails her utterly and she transitions to the next stage – beyond the bounds of the human life cycle – the spiritual perception and understanding that she has gained on her journey will enter a new phase of knowing, the heavenly perspicacity from which she has hitherto been separated.

The connections among vision, medicine, mysticism, life cycle, and reproduction are central to the final assimilation of what this book has attempted to unravel. Margery Kempe's particular form of spirituality makes no distinction between the corporeal and mystical, either in her reception of divine communication (seeing as ‘verily’ with her ‘gostly eye’ as with her ‘bodily eye’), or in her visceral response to those visions or voices, as her devotion is articulated in a vociferously embodied way. What she sees, and how she feels, are the means through which she reaches at least a form of truth. As Jeffrey Hamburger has argued, ‘Mysticism, at least mysticism understood as the experiential cognition of God (“cognitio Dei experimentalis”), cannot, it turns out, be imagined without recourse to the visible, however it is defined.’