English Prose Treatises of Richard Rolle (review)

Not long after the death of Richard Rolle in 1349, a Carthusian commentator joined a controversy that was to engage readers of the hermit of Hampole into the modern era. The Carthusian asserted that Rolle's writings were materia quasi ruine et decepcionis. Nevertheless, during his lifetime, and until about 1500, Rolle was the most widely read of named English authors. Wills refer to his English books more often than any other vernacular texts, and his predominantly Latin writings survive in nearly 500 manuscripts. A firm basis therefore exists for exploring the reasons for Rolle's popularity. The present study focuses on those literary features of Ego Dormio, The Commandment and The Form of Living that are designed to involve the reader and encourage him or her 'in an intimate journey towards the love of God' (p. ix). In tracing what it recognises as the discursive subtlety of Rolle's address to his readers, McIlroy further explores the affectivity of his English treatises, their avoidance of gender-specificity, and their implicit broadening of the audience beyond the immediate recipient, the Yorkshire Cistercian nun, Margaret Kirkeby.

Rolle's huge corpus, in which Latin writings predominate, continues to challenge scholars and commentators. Editions of single works provide an essential basis for investigation, but major compositions, such as Incendium Amoris, the Latin Psalter and the English Psalter, and nine Latin scriptural commentaries, are available only in dated or otherwise inadequate editions, as unpublished theses, or in manuscript. During the century and more of modern Rolle scholarship, Carl Horstman's collection of Rolle's works in Yorkshire Writers (1895-1896), Hope Emily Allen's Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle (1927), and Nicholas Watson's Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority (1991) have emerged as landmark general studies. The last-named expands the textual focus of its predecessors to provide an informed analytical survey and chronology of all Rolle's works. It departs from most modern commentary in tracing the emergence of the author from his writings as 'an abrasive personality, with a highly developed sense of his own rightness and importance in the scheme of things' (p. 43). The present study, by contrast, reverts to a sympathetic approach to Rolle as a spiritual guide, and its reading of the English treatises often contests Watson's conclusions.

A premise of English Prose Treatises of Richard Rolle is that 'interest in the ideological and theoretical structures underlying Rolle's texts has only recently begun to allow works such as Rolle's to be considered literature' (p. 4). But as early as 1932 R. W. Chambers' essay, On the Continuity of English Prose, ensured the entry of Rolle's vernacular texts into the literary canon. Hope Emily Allen's The English Writings of Richard Rolle (1931) became the standard edition for the next half-century. In 1988 Sarah Ogilvie-Thomson re-edited Rolle's shorter English works for EETS, using the authoritative Longleat 29 manuscript as copy-text, and in the same year Rosamund Allen published a translation with introduction in the Classics of Western Spirituality series. Over the years Margaret Amassian, Teresa Brady, Ellen Caldwell, Daniel Rygiel and Denis Renevey have analysed the contents and structure of the treatises. Such a history of scholarship casts doubt on McIlroy's assertion that interest in Rolle as a personality has diverted attention from literary study of his English treatises. On the other hand, the inaccessibility of Rolle's commentaries and his often eccentric Latin style have indeed created an imbalance in scholarly attention. The direction of the present study to a reworking of known territory when so much of the Rolle landscape remains virgin is disappointing.

Given the brevity of Ego Dormio, The Commandment and The Form of Living – respectively 313, 224, and 897 lines in Ogilvie-Thomson's edition – the book's coverage must rate as comprehensive. Some of the length is unfortunately to be attributed to repetition of ideas and to verbal redundancies...