The English Manuscripts of Richard Rolle: A Descriptive Catalogue (review)

Ralph Hanna's field of interest is described on a web page from Keble College, Oxford, where Hanna is a Fellow, as covering the use of medieval books, mostly books made in England, regardless of language, over the period from 700 to 1700. Indeed, his contribution to 'the history of the book' in England is unsurpassed and he has provided readers with an impressive corpus of scholarly discussions, edited works, and descriptive catalogues over a long career.

The present descriptive catalogue of the English manuscripts of the Yorkshire hermit and visionary, Richard Rolle, is a work that Hanna ruefully admits 'has been a remarkably long time coming to print'. Over some twenty years Hanna has researched, collected, and catalogued in excess of 120 manuscripts containing works attributed to Rolle, a medieval writer who was widely recognized in the later English Middle Ages as a major spiritual author and whose status, it is suggested, makes it appropriate that he will be the only Middle English author other than Chaucer to have an author-based bibliography. The catalogue follows the publication of a recent edited collection by Hanna, Richard Rolle: Uncollected Prose and Verse with Related Northern Texts (Oxford, 2007), which he had modestly described as being a 'spin-off' to the present catalogue. The twenty manuscripts re-edited or newly edited in this volume attest to Hanna's deep understanding of Rolle's textual nuances along with his exhaustive knowledge of the provenance of attributed manuscripts. This edited collection is also a fitting prelude to the catalogue in that it seeks to fill in the gaps that Hanna perceives in other editions of Rolle's works and, from the outset, defines itself in opposition to Sarah Ogilvie-Thomson's Richard Rolle: Prose and Verse (Oxford, 1988). Hanna has long complained about the marginalization of a number of Rolle's texts that did not appear in Ogilvie-Thomson's edition, and about the linguistically misrepresentative effect of her non-Northern based manuscript. The argument is continued in the catalogue with the inclusion of a table of equivalents to Ogilvie-Thomson's edition.

The English Manuscripts of Richard Rolle: A Descriptive Catalogue itself gives a comprehensive description of each of Rolle's works and includes full details of contents and codicology. Hanna also provides an introduction to Rolle's canon explaining its significance and examining the transmission of his writings, and the 'note on editorial procedure' offers a guide to the conventions of presentation used through out the catalogue. Within the introduction Hanna acknowledges the debt of earlier editors of Rolle's works such as G. G. Perry, Karl Horstmann, and Hope E. Allen and describes their work as 'utterly central to manuscript studies' in that 'they convey a still largely uninvestigated vernacular religious culture, mainly in prose, wide spread throughout the later Middle Ages'. Following the canon of works defined by Allen, Hanna makes only one addition by arguing for the inclusion of Lessouns of Dirige, a text ascribed to Rolle in the Middle Ages but generally over-looked by modern editors. Readers familiar with Rolle's accepted canon will also be interested in Hanna's discussion regarding the lyric canon, an often contentious subject amongst editors of Rolle's works, which he suggests is largely dependent on assessments of the two large anthologies of such texts: Cambridge University Library, MS Dd.v.64 and Warminster, Longleat House, Marquess of Bath, MS 29.

In the body of the catalogue each manuscript description follows an identical schema. The manuscript's physical appearance is outlined, followed by a list of the contents of the whole manuscript with the Rollean content in bold. Subsequently the collation, decoration, dialect, provenance, and binding are described in detail. For relevant manuscripts Hanna includes information about any descriptions and discussions that are extant for the manuscript (such as its inclusion in an earlier catalogue or a facsimile edition...