Correspondence

Richard Rolle, Thomas Arundel and Professor Hanna

Dear Sir,

In the last issue of The Library (ante, 7th series, vol. 14 no. 3, 313-33) Professor Hanna has provided a useful guide to the conditions in which Richard Rolle's Latin words were copied and transmitted in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Unfortunately he has elected to coat this plain and wholesome dish with a much more dubious, if spicier, sauce of polemic, taking issue with what purport to be my assertions on the responsibility of Archbishop Arundel and his circle for the deliberate transmission of Rolle's writings. In support of his case he cites an article I contributed some years ago to Margaret Aston's festschrift, on Arundel's approach to orthodox reform, in the light of the Wycliffite challenge.¹ However his misrepresenta tion of my argument there is so comprehensively perverse as to mislead readers significantly about the case I was trying rather tentatively to make.

On one point he quite rightly corrects me. John Newton the master of Peterhouse and vicar-general of Arundel at York cannot be the John Newton who amended the text of Rolle's works now found in Emmanuel College, Cambridge MS 35, and I should not have relied on Hope Emily Allen's identification without seeing the manuscript. The master of Peterhouse was, however, the owner of a Rolle text in a collection of northern authors mentioned in his will.² On the main point, Hanna attributes to me the assertion that Archbishop Arundel 'arranged the copying and dissemination of Rolle's works' (ante, p. 313) and the contention that anyone (i.e. someone) was 'in charge of the hermit's canon' (p. 324). These attributions are wholly inaccurate. I merely noted official interest (i.e. interest by responsible church officials) in devotional reading among Arundel's associates at York, leaving the archbishop's own role quite uncertain ('Shaping the mixed life', p. 99). I called this group, with Richard Scrope in particular in mind, 'the principal agents in the diffusion of Richard Rolle's contemplative works', since Scrope, the former rector of Ainderby to whom Rolle's disciple Margaret Kirkeby must have been known, and future bishop of Lichfield where Yorkshire spiritual texts including Rolle's were widely propagated, was an obvious if not the only agent of propagation; as to Arundel's own role, it was, as I remarked, 'at most indirect' (p. 101).

These speculations (I claimed no more for them), which include Arundel's possible but undemonstrated knowledge of Walter Hilton's work, are justified because of the clear evidence that Arundel directly promoted the circulation of one work of popular devotion, namely Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, which he 'by his metropolitan authority commanded that as a catholic book it should be published for the edification of the faithful and as a refutation of the heretics or Lollards.'³ Active propagation of religious literature should surprise nobody in an age of organized diffusion of the Lollard sermon-cycle and Carthusian circulation of devotional texts. Hanna's own analysis of the principal manuscripts of Rolle's Latin works shows that individual Rolle texts were not always available and had to be searched for. It does not show that the searchers had no consistent interest in making them available — rather the opposite, in fact. If, as is abundantly clear, nobody had 'control' of this process, diocesan officials like Richard Scrope who had known Margaret Kirkeby may well have been able to influence it by allowing texts to be copied. Hanna's account of the transmission of Rolle's works, based on examination of the manuscripts, is entirely credible, but quite irrelevant, however important in itself, to my line of argument. If I did not refer to textual studies it is not because I have been out of touch with them for the last three hundred years (ante, p. 328), but because they are extraneous to the point I was making.

Hanna speculates that as an historian of universities I approach English literature from a model of 'curricular development', see English literature 'as an historical...