The title of this essay is furnished by one of Baudri of Bourgueil’s autobiographical poems, ‘De sufficientia votorum suorum’. We shall return to the title’s rich polysemy in due course. What it refers to, in the first place, is a topos borrowed from Horace: the modest wealth and the snug self-sufficiency of the rural poet–landowner, who displays his agrarian and rhetorical bounty in copious lists and descriptions. Baudri is not alone in imitating this topos. Of the three poems under consideration here, Hildebert of Lavardin’s ‘De casu huius mundi’ would seem to be the linchpin. It apparently made an impression on contemporary readers and was widely copied, read, and imitated. Henry of Huntingdon’s ‘De statu suo’ is a direct reply to it, even a parody. So, probably, but less overtly, is Baudri’s poem. Each poem can be seen as an independent response to Horace, but they can also be seen in relation to each other.

I will argue that all three poems are a form of self-writing, that they are autobiographical, albeit not autobiographies in the sense of a sequential narrative of life-events: narrative events or prosopographical data are scarce in these poems. Yet they explicitly explore a sense of self; they seek to determine where self ends and world begins. Or, to give them the more political turn the poets would probably desire, they explore the boundaries between private and public selves.

All three terms of this statement – ‘self’, ‘autobiography’, and the distinction between public and private – are contested in medieval studies; older scholarship, especially, often banned them outright from pre-modern contexts. I do not wish to deny that self, self-writing, and privacy have a history; or that we should expect major differences in how they are perceived and articulated in different times and cultural contexts; or that social rules for when and how one may properly speak of oneself vary immensely. But I would like to set these debates aside for now and employ what Peter von Moos has aptly called a ‘controlled anachronism’. He is referring specifically to the public/private distinction, but the idea is transferable to the related concepts of self and autobiography.