"Julie Chappell has published scholarly texts, creative non-fiction, and poetry, and it is her ease in all three styles that makes Perilous Passages a pleasure to read. While thoroughly documenting each step of her research, she pays attention to pace and pauses for emphasis, summing up the pertinent details, inserting anecdotes about the more colorful characters whose lives were touched, sometimes unknowingly, by Margery Kempe's Book." - Medievally Speaking

"Chappell's Perilous Passages relates the complex, almost miraculous, survival of the single text of The Book of Margery Kempe to the story of Kempe's own life, the 'palimpsest' of her own spiritual awakening and the claiming of her spiritual voice. This carefully researched and intellectually imaginative book will be of interest to scholars of medieval Christianity in many fields, from material culture to women's studies, to theology." - E. Ann Matter, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor and Professor of Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania, USA

"Perilous Passages makes a fascinating and unique contribution to the study of Margery Kempe and her Book. Flawlessly researched, engagingly written and richly detailed, it carries readers on the many physical migrations of Kempe's manuscript through turbulent English Catholic history, while arguing that Kempe's purpose was to embody her own spiritual journey in textual form." - Amanda L. Capern, University of Hull, UK