The ‘Passio Domini’ Theme in the Works of Richard Rolle: his Personal Contribution in its Religious, Cultural, and Literary Context by Mary Felicitas Madigan, I.B.V.M. (review)

REVIEWS Steadman has pointed out, precedents for his own flexibility as their follower. When McAlpine makes Troilus' virtue depend upon his avoid­ ing the example of Paris and Criseyde's partial excuse depend upon her not becoming another Helen, she recognizes an allusive strategy at least as old as the fourth book of the Aeneid, a strategy carefully explicated by the Servian glosses. Any fully satisfying definition of Chaucerian tragedy would do well to follow Steadman's example, and look to epic practice rather than to Boethian philosophy. ROBERTS. HALLER University of Nebraska-Lincoln MARY FELICITAS MADIGAN, I.B.V.M., The 'Passio Domini' Theme in the Works of Richard Rolle: his Personal Contribution in its Religious, Cultural, and Literary Context. Salzburg Studies in English Liter­ ature, Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies, 79. Institut for Englische Sprache und Literatur, Salzburg, 1978. About three miles from Beverley, with its great minster, there stand the ruins of the Cistercian abbey of Meaux, ruled over from 1339 to 1349 by one Abbot Hugh. In the same county ofYorkshire lived the hermit Richard Rolle (c. 1300-49), mystic, writer, and-for some-saint. Sometime during his abbacy, Abbot Hugh, significantly, commissioned a crucifix to be carved from a naked live model; and this is symbolic of the new striving for realism in artistic treatments ofthe Passion, so conspic­ uous in iconography and literature of the period-not least in Rolle's works-which is owed ultimately to the piety of the good abbot's Cistercian predecessors, and pre-eminently to St. Bernard. For Rolle himself, indeed, the Passion, in its most human aspects, was 'a core theme of his concept of the spiritual life'. There is, of course, ample justification for the study of Rolle, despite the allegedly elementary nature of his mystical life, for, as Sr. Madigan says, he 'embodied in a remarkable degree the chief distinguishing marks of the devotional life of fourteenth-century England,' namely a deeply affectionate devotion to the Person of Christ (including the emphasis on the use of the Holy Name 'as comprehending the entire redemptive mystery'), a reaction to the intellectualism of the schools in his preference for love over knowledge, a tendency towards individualism and the 179 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER availability-because in the vernacular-of his works to the growing group of devout and literate laymen (which was, of course, to include Chaucer among its members). He is also an important landmark in the development of early English literary prose. Moreover, over four hun­ dred manuscripts of his works attest his immense popularity in his own time and later. Sr. Madigan aims to examine Rolle's contribution, through his Meditations on the Passion, to the devotional literature of medieval Eng­ land, and to the development ofM.E. literary prose. Chapter 1 explores the aspects of Rolle's milieu upon which he drew. Biblical, liturgical, and iconographical matters are dealt with, the citation of pictorial evidence still existing in and around York naturally being specially apposite. The influence ofSt. Bernard, the Victorines, and St. Bonaven­ ture is predictably stressed in a section on medieval spirituality, and other sections examine the rhetorical tradition and 'native English atti­ tudes.' Chapter 2 examines Rolle's contribution to· medieval devotional literature (major themes, influence, etc.), where the difficult question of his canon inevitably arises. After some discussion, however, Sr. Madigan is content, like others before her, to accept H. E. Allen's settlement of this question (although the authorship of the Meditations is discussed more fully later), while rightly rejecting, however, Allen's view of Rolle as a 'pre-Lollard' reformer. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the Meditations more deeply, including a painstaking stylistic analysis. The statement that Rolle related the biblical Passion story without incorporating popular apocryphal inci­ dents perhaps needs modification (what about his emphasis on the intentional bluntness of the nails used at the crucifixion?). Some atten­ tion is given to Anglo-Norman and Scandinavian vocabulary (note, however, that there is no extant manuscript of the Meditations wholly in Rolle's own, northern, dialect). The question of puns is interesting, e.g., Rolle's exploitation of the whole-hale-holy complex, plus hele ('hid­ ing...