In medieval England, a woman named Margery Kempe decided to devote her life to pilgrimage.
After a sudden and intense religious conversion, Kempe began traveling around England to listen to sermons and meet with mystics, gathering an account of her life and what she learned into a record known as The Book of Margery Kempe — one of the earliest autobiographies written in English. She did this despite a lack of any formal education in reading, writing, or theology, depending on preaching, song, and those who read out loud to her.
Now, 600 years later, Kempe’s words — the patterns and rhymes she picked up from homilies and sermons — inform literary scholars of English aural culture in the Middle Ages. One such scholar is Ann Killian, OP, who follows Kempe's attempts to write her own life by borrowing language from the texts she heard and remembered.
An assistant professor in the Department of English, Killian writes and teaches about medieval literature and devotional culture. She’s particularly interested in the social life of poetry — not just what was written down, but how it affected people in the past. In her in-progress first monograph, “Reforming Lyric: Poetry and Theology in England, 1380-1530,” she places the genre of religious lyric as a key proponent of the English vernacular’s legitimacy in scriptural teaching.
“Poetry had a larger life than what we see written in the books that we have,” said Killian, who came to Notre Dame after two years at Ohio Dominican University. “How did most people encounter this poetry, and how did it feature in theological education?”
Seeing the past through poems
Often, medieval poetry was written anonymously for other people to share. With the era’s low literacy rates, poems were designed to be easy to remember and repeat by people who couldn’t encounter them through writing. A priest might write a poem as the lyrics for a religious procession, for his parishioners to say, or to use in sermons.
For Killian — a fellow of the Medieval Institute, where she also spent two years as a postdoc after earning her Ph.D. from Yale University — this literary culture provides an excitingly complex way to piece together an image of a time marked by the religious controversy leading up to the Reformation. But recently, she’s been studying a medieval poet who’s an exception to the standard of anonymity — John Audelay.
He created a book of poems he wrote and poems he collected and wanted to preserve, but unlike most medieval authors, he wrote himself into many of his poems, saying things like, “Pray for me, the Blind Audelay.”
The reason Audelay perhaps wanted readers to pray for him, Killian said, was intense guilt. The poet worked as a chaplain for a noble family, so when his lord — a person whose moral behavior Audelay considered himself responsible for — caused the death of a parishioner, Audelay’s poetry became a cry for absolution.
“We all have some little bit of understanding that comes from our own life experiences, our own insight, and we can only move toward a greater understanding of truth from being in dialogue with one another.”
“A lot of medieval literature betrays this ongoing anxiety about, ‘Have I done something I haven’t confessed or repented for?’” Killian said.
The unique traits found in Audelay’s work reflect the penance-based medieval justice system. Audelay is fearful his misdeeds endanger his salvation, but he tries to atone through his writing, she said, presenting his own redemption arc as an example others might follow.
Killian focused on Audelay’s poems about the joyful love of God, as opposed to his dread of death, in a chapter she wrote for an upcoming collection edited by Susanna Fein, a professor emerita in Kent State University’s English department.
Killian’s next project will examine how medieval writers describe and teach the practice of contemplation. In most medieval writing, contemplative prayer is illustrated as imagining Christ’s face when looking in a mirror — picturing oneself as a likeness of God to actually become more like God. But Killian is investigating a different analogy: gardening.
“Poets liken contemplation to breaking up hard soil, pulling up weeds, and planting seeds,” she said.
Killian argues that medieval writers, such as Mechtild of Helfta and Julian of Norwich, reconceived contemplation as inner work meant to benefit the community. Beyond self-transformation, contemplation bears fruit to nourish one’s neighbors.
This project will be part of her second book, “Mystical Ecology,” which will trace the way medieval contemplative writers engage with and think through the natural world in their prayer practice.
Imagining a different world
For Killian, finding new ways of seeing faith and self in old writing is a large part of what draws her to medieval poetry.
“Going back to the medieval world — it almost works in a similar way to fantasy or science fiction,” she said. “It’s imagining how the world could be otherwise.”
The world she wants to see is one built on community, and it’s one she’s already working to create as a vowed member of the Dominican Sisters of Peace, a congregation of Catholic women religious.
Part of the Dominican tradition is seeking truth, and Killian has exercised this charism in becoming a professor, which keeps her engaged in large academic conversations and lets her lead the seminar classes she’s always loved. Last semester, she explored morality, temptation, and human freedom with students in Demons, Tyrants, and Villains in Early English Drama. This semester, she’s bringing students on a literary journey from the Book of Job to the Black Lives Matter movement in the University Seminar course Life After Loss: Poets on Grief.
Killian wants her students to talk across time with past thinkers, artists, and poets — as well as with their classmates. The hope is they’ll understand who they are and what they want the world to be.
“Each of us has a piece of the truth,” she said. “We all have some little bit of understanding that comes from our own life experiences, our own insight, and we can only move toward a greater understanding of truth from being in dialogue with one another.”
Originally published by at al.nd.edu on February 16, 2026.