So writes John Clyn, a friar of Kilkenny, after the plague has left him all alone, the sole survivor of his brethren, and soon to succumb himself. This longing to leave behind at least some testimony that we ever existed may be universal, but it is a powerful part of the various forms of self-commemoration and self-fictionalisation through which an autobiographical impetus manifests itself across medieval English textual culture. It is high time to challenge the orthodoxy that the Middle Ages are irrelevant to understanding the evolution of those more recent autobiographical forms which so satisfyingly mirror back to us the complexity and subtlety of our modern selves. When the craft of life-writing was pursued so frequently and so perceptively as it was in the Middle Ages, it would seem intrinsically unlikely that – as is so often repeated – medieval authors regarded writing about the self as a profitless vanity and rarely did so. Auto(bio)graphy in medieval English texts is more an action than a form, an act of self-assertion, only exceptionally expressed through any extended narrative, which itself may appear discontinuous and bitty. But modes of auto(bio)graphical activity can be identified as subsumed and implicit, bubbling up across very different medieval genres, which poses the question whether medieval representations of selves in more fragmented forms – interstitial, implicit, in unnerving fusions of fact and self-fictionalisation – may not offer their own compellingly unillusioned readings of how far the self may be represented.