The Question of a Fictionalised Version of ‘the Self’ in Hoccleve’s La Male Regle and Kempe’s The Book of Margery Kempe Amelia Coen College

The act of self-presentation allows the writer to present a specific image of oneself, often with a clearly identifiable motivation often matching the expectations and preferences of the desired audience/readership; and thus to some extent self-presentation is the act of presenting an idealised version of oneself. Despite being a rather unusual idea within Medieval Literature, the concept of self-presentation is a central concept to the works of Kempe and Hoccleve. In particular The Book of Margery Kempe, which follows a narrative depicting the spiritual epiphany and subsequent life long religious devotion of a medieval woman, is often viewed to be an integral component to the Middle English canon of life writing, being regarded by modern critics as an “electrifying and authoritative”[1]account of how a woman was able to evade contemporary socio-religious persecution; within her criticism of The Book,McAvoy describes how, “The Book of Margery Kempe constitutes a unique and riveting account of a woman’s spiritual and intellectual growth within the context of a mercantile and status-conscious East Anglia,”[2]whilst Krug explains how the text is “viewed as the most important evidence of women’s involvement in late medieval...