My previous chapter examined some of the ways in which Hoccleve cultivated the idea of his work as the copyist of his own poems as part of his bid to win his addressees’ good will. Hoccleve's professional employment at the Privy Seal as well as his intimate connections to the London book trade also afforded him the skills and the personal contacts necessary in order to realize his self-publishing pose. The control that Hoccleve executed over the production of copies of his poems is unusual; among late medieval English writers only Capgrave can currently be found to rival the scale of his autography. But Hoccleve was not alone in his attempts to exploit the rhetorical potential of the idea of his self-publication. Other Middle English authors also worked to create the impression of their physical proximity to their manuscripts by narrating their involvement in the material reproduction of their works. Margery Kempe, John Audelay, and Charles d’Orléans were each keen to establish their authorizing presence via descriptions of the role that they played as their own publishers, supervising the copying and compiling of their texts or writing them out themselves. Like Hoccleve too, Kempe, Audelay, and Charles lived and composed their texts in dissatisfactory material and social conditions, conditions that they hoped to ameliorate by means of their writing. Kempe is distinguished among the authors treated in this study by the supplementary pressures that her gender imposed on her work.

Some medieval women certainly served as their own secretaries, particularly in times of need, as we saw in the case of Agnes Paston, whose letter to William Paston I was cited in Chapter One. Although women did on occasion inscribe their own words and although the description of Kempe's procurement of scribal labour in the Book of Margery Kempe is shaped by contemporary concerns regarding the dangers of women's literacy, this chapter argues that there are good reasons for taking at face value the account made at the work's opening of Kempe's practical reliance on her amanuenses. I view the Book of Margery Kempe as a work that wants to engage the idea of Kempe's participation in its writing but that is frustrated in this aim by imperatives both practical and political.