Margery Kempe

I've been (re)reading _The Book of Margery Kempe_ for a class I'm teaching. And the text, although not Margery herself, always feels like an old friend. Margery seems to represent so many things, many of them strikingly modern-feeling. And she is, you know, the first autobiography written in English. Or at least, the oldest text we have that's an autobiography. But even this autobiographyness is remarkably complex and interesting. For Margery herself is, apparently, illiterate. And she cannot speak and write to us directly. Rather she speaks to a scribe (probably a series of scribes) and he tells us her story, almost exclusively in the third person. What does it mean, then, that she doesn't have the agency to write her own story? And is it truly autobiography?