This book analyzes key twelfth-century Latin and vernacular texts that articulate a subjective autobiographical stance. The reader is led into a complex maze of paths, through intellectually daunting issues such as the relation of subject to object, self to body, body to text and text to language. The contention is that the self forged in medieval literature could not have come into existence without the gap between Latinity and the vernacular and the shift in perspective in the twelfth century toward a visual and spatial orientation.