Richard Rolle: Emendatio Vitae; Orationes ad honorem nominis Ihesu (review)

Short Notices 283 corpus of exploration texts. A more stimulating volume might have looked equally to the future. Andrew McRae Department of EngUsh University of Sydney Watson, Nicholas, ed., Richard Rolle: Emendatio Vitae; Orationes ad honorem nominis Ihesu (Toronto Medieval Latin Texts 21), Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1995; paper; pp. 88; R.R.P. US$6.75. Nicholas Watson's edition of the fourteenth-century hermit Richard RoUe's Latin epistle Emendatio Vitae is accompanied by a medieval compilation of extracts from his writings entitled 'Orationes ad honorem nominis Ihesu'. The book fulfils aU the criteria outlined in the preface of the Toronto Medieval Latin Texts series. Devoted to providing editions suitable for university courses, the series bases editions on one manuscript only with the minimum of textual apparatus, encouraging editors to select manuscripts that reflect a textual hadition astittleas possible removed from the author's original version. Watson's selection of Cambridge University Library Manuscript Dd.v.64 for his version of Emendatio Vitae, the main text to appear here, is most appropriate. This has long been considered an excellent RoUe manuscript, containing a wide selection of his works in both Latin and EngUsh. FoUowing a brief establishment of the hermit's literary and theological inheritance, the introductory material offers an insightful glance at RoUe's biography and works on concentrating RoUe's place in the socio-religious context of his period as 'a minor player in the history of medieval European contemplative writing . . . but a major one in the more insular world of English spirituality'. In England Rolle's contemporary popularity is uncontested; some five hundred manuscripts remain to remind us of the fact. Watson is quick to justify a single manuscript edition of Emendatio Vitae, a text extant in over one hundred manuscripts and several early printed editions, with his prediction that a full critical edition of a text with such vast 284 Short Notices manuscript dissemination is unlikely in the near future. This discussion leads to a clarification of his choice of the accompanying compilatory work Orationes ad honorem nominis Ihesu, a text with a weaker relationship to the 'original' works mentioned in the preface. Throughout his writings RoUe utitises the technique of textual compilation extensively; part of Emendatio Vitae itself is a compilation of Rolle's earlier works. This leads Watson to conclude that the process of adaptation was taken up by others after Rolle's death, w h o compiled works of 'Rolleana'. H e firmly establishes the Orationes as a member of 'thistittle-studiedsecondary canon, being m a d e up of "purple" passages from several of Rolle's works'. Critical appraisal of Rolle has risen to prominence in recent years, yet a bias towards his English works, composed originally for a female religious audience, has left m a n y of his Latin works largely neglected by modern editors, with a number of them as yet to appear in print. Thus, any Latin edition of Rolle's works is a welcome addition to the library of the student of Rolle or any reader interested in late medieval Latin prose. This is particularly the case with the Latin Emendatio Vitae, arguably Rolle's most popular work, which has long been overlooked by modern scholars in favour of the fifteenthcentury English translation by the Carmelite friar Richard Misyn, the original Latin being last published in 1694. Emendatio Vitae is Rolle's only epistle composed in Latin and therefore should be of interest to readers of the Rolle canon as a precursor to the three vernacular epistles connected with his name that have gained more extensive modern critical attention. Inclusion of the Orationes serves as an interesting comparison to Rolle's o w n compilatory technique and also offers an insight into the reception of Rolle at the height of his popularity in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Claire Mcllroy Departments of English and History University of Western Australia ...