Richard Rolle: Uncollected Prose and Verse with Related Northern Texts (review)

In this absorbing and subtly presented edition, Ralph Hanna continues both his editorial labors and his attempt to rethink the history of Middle English religious writing from the ground of the manuscript evidence up, in this case by reopening the question of Richard Rolle's vernacular canon. This question is usually assumed to have been settled long ago by Hope Emily Allen, in her monumental Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole, and Materials For His Biography (1927): a book which rendered much previous scholarship on Rolle, based on Carl Horstmann's still vaster Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle, an English Father of the Church, and His Followers (1895-96), obsolete at a stroke by successfully challenging many of Horstmann's attributions. In the intervening near century, the vernacular canon has if anything tended to shrink further, with the sidelining of likely genuine Rolle texts in the Thornton manuscript and several lyrics ascribed to him elsewhere. This process culminated in Sara Ogilvie-Thomson's Richard Rolle: Prose and Verse, published by the Early English Text Society in 1988, which argued that, apart from the lengthy and important English Psalter and a single passion meditation, only the works gathered in MS Longleat 29 have a clear claim to be considered Rolle's. Longleat 29 preserves the main series of Rolle's epistles and some shorter texts in a collection Ogilvie-Thomson plausibly argues that Rolle brought together for his disciple, the anchoress Margaret Kirkeby.

Hanna's contribution to this editorial history is less to add new works to the canon in any definitive sense than to restore to Rolle the texts Allen accepts are his but that have come to seem suspect during this slow pruning process and to bring their editions up to modern standards, while asking scholars to undertake a wider reexamination of the Rolle canon by providing first editions of a number of works attributed to him in the manuscripts that Allen excluded or ignored. By way of rounding off what is effectively a sequel to Ogilvie-Thomson's edition, Hanna also edits for the first time a group of "related northern texts," translations from Vitae patrum of two epistles and a passage of dialogue from Huntington Library MS HM 148: works not by Rolle but evocative of his eremitic milieu.

This is a rich and fascinating brew. Still, there is potential for confusion in any edition that brings together writings of varying canonical status, and it is important to spell out the claims Hanna makes here for what he edits, not least because his conception of what a canon is itself shimmers slightly from situation to situation. Thornton contains five items it attributes to Rolle, four of which form the first part of the edition. There is "Oleum effusum," a vernacularization of a section of Rolle's beautiful Latin exposition of the opening of the Song of Songs. There is a set of exempla, one of them associated with his early Judica Me. And there are expositions of the Ten Commandments and the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, which Allen included only reluctantly in her account of Rolle's vernacular writings, since they lack his characteristic stylistic hallmarks. This group of works can be considered canonical in a historical sense, since in itself it represents a kind of vernacular canon, but Hanna considers that only the last two works, and likely some of the exempla, are actually by Rolle. "Oleum effusum," edited in parallel with a second copy in Dublin, Trinity College MS 155, is the work of a "Northern translator" (pp. lvi-lvii), whom Hanna does not identify with Rolle. This is surely right, but the presentation of these four items in a volume describing itself as Rolle's "Uncollected Works" runs the risk of trapping the unwary rather as Horstmann did, especially as Hanna does not dis-identify the "Northern translator" with Rolle either. Hanna...