Writing these words in the context of her investigation into the lives of medieval women, Judith Bennett could indeed have been referring specifically to Margery Kempe, whose book has been ploughed endlessly as a rich source of information for historians, theologians, literary critics and even psychologists since the rediscovery of the only extant manuscript in 1934. Bennett's findings have suggested that medieval women – of whom Margery Kempe is perhaps one of the best documented – were frequently able to search out and appropriate a myriad of ways of functioning more comfortably within a society which imposed the ‘pressures of patriarchal oppression’ upon them. Concurring with Bynum on this issue, Bennett asserts that women's lives were subject to a central paradox which arose out of contrary expectations of them imposed by society and the Church. According to Bennett, however, such a paradox ‘both shaped the lives of medieval women and allowed medieval women themselves to shape, to some extent, the content of their own experiences’.