Analysing a wide range of pre-modern women’s non-fictional life-writing – letters, memoirs, wills – from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, this thesis assesses the authors’ appropriation of mercantile discourse and practice to portray and vindicate various areas of their lives. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath boldly states in her ‘Prologue’ (c.1437), ‘Wynne whoso may, for al is for to selle’, but did historical women believe so too? A feminist and historicist interrogation of the commercial language and theory employed in the quotidian texts created by women is needed to fill a gap in the historiography and literary history of women. The introductory chapter contextualises the complex social and religious attitudes to women and money that female writers had to negotiate in their everyday lives as well as in their texts, and exposes the neglect that these texts have suffered in favour of studies of canonical literature – which is overwhelmingly male-authored. The Introduction concludes with a brief analysis of Chaucer’s Alisoun of Bath as a jumping-off point for the subsequent assessment of women’s writing. The correspondence of the Paston women of the fifteenth century, the Thynne women of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries and the Civil War letters of Brilliana Harley are the subject of the second chapter. How do these practical documents engage with and manipulate commercial vocabulary for their own purposes? In the third chapter, letters written in the action of life are replaced with the retrospective memoirs of Margery Kempe’s Boke (1436-8) and Martha Moulsworth’s poetic autobiography, ‘The Memorandum of Martha Moulsworth Widdowe’ (1632). These two texts, and their authors, could not be more different, and yet both utilise mercantile rhetoric with striking effect. In the fourth chapter, I assess the final act of textual life administration: the will. This formulaic legal document may seem an unlikely source of female agency, but an analysis of bequests, terminology and the nuances of expression makes fruitful discoveries. Testaments range from 1422 to 1646, providing wide scope across historical period, religious belief and social rank. Finally, the concluding ‘Codicil’ of this thesis draws the findings of the previous chapters to a close with a discussion of Isabella Whitney’s fictional poetic ‘Wyll’ (1573) and Elizabeth Joscelin’s Legacy to Her Unborn Child (1622). The similarities and differences of women writers’ appropriation of mercantile discourse across the late medieval and early modern periods, their social rank, their religion, and their choice of genre will be considered. How far did pre-modern women writers manipulate fiscal vocabulary, commercial theory and mercantile metaphor to inhabit traditionally male roles? In what ways do they utilise this rhetoric to carve out a uniquely female space within their writings and contemporary societies? Do their writings reveal that each author really ‘evyr desyryd mor and mor’?