Outstanding, Bruce - I really like these posts.
An autobiography written in the middle ages - without centuries of editing and layer after layer of revisions - anthropological
gold.
Interesting story about how the book was re-discovered. I would have cut-n-pasted it but Google Books makes that difficult. Short version: 1934: some folks in England were playing ping-pong in the basement and needed to find another ball so started poking around and in an old cupboard, came across some very old leather-bound books. Turns out one of the folks was with a museum and had them analyzed and discovered one of them was the autobiography in question.
Who knows... maybe Margery nudged them to find it :-)
I found an
online copy of the original but its nearly unreadable - a more readable translation is on
Google books .