Hope Allen’s ‘Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle’: A Corrected List of Copies by A. I. Doyle and Ralph Hanna (review)

Before his passing in 2018 ian doyle, described in the preface to this volume as ‘England’s greatest student of vernacular literature’ (p. xv), had bequeathed to Ralph Hanna an archive of additions and corrections to Hope Allen’s 1927 Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole. Using this archive, in conjunction with his own substantial research, Hanna has concluded the long-anticipated present work, A List of Corrected Copies—an impressive updating, and in many ways reshaping, of Allen’s prodigious catalogue of Rollean works.

Hope Allen’s systematic (albeit often eclectic) organization of manuscripts, containing both writings ascribed to Richard Rolle and material relating to his biography, remains an important contribution to our understanding of both the Rollean corpus and late medieval English religious works in general. Her book was the first to establish a reliable canon of Rolle’s works, to provide an overview of the sheer volume of manuscripts that contain his works and the first to offer analytical insights into his writing and spiritualty. Since the publication of Allen’s work there have, of course, been many more manuscripts discovered and a good deal of excellent scholarship devoted to the life and writings of Richard Rolle, particularly over the last forty or so years. In A List of Corrected Copies, Doyle and Hanna have drawn on this collective scholarship to provide not only comprehensive ‘corrections and additions to the manuscript archive she [Allen] assembled’ (p. xvii)—in fact almost doubling Allen’s list of manuscripts—but also, where needed, valuable updates and clarifications to the naming, location, and attribution of the manuscripts detailed throughout.

Doyle and Hanna stress that their primary aim is to ‘supplement’ Allen’s volume and as such they have retained her original lists and have ‘simply corrected and augmented these in as consistent a way as we can conceive’ (p. xvii). They maintain Allen’s ordering of Rolle’s works and within this structure have added the manuscripts discovered since the publication of her work—the most notable departure to this being the removal of the ‘Dubia’ section to the end of the present volume.

The main body of the book consists of the catalogue of Rolle’s works—as ascribed by Allen—beginning with ‘The Office’, followed by ‘Early Works (Latin)’, ‘Scriptural Commentaries’ (Miscellaneous)’, ‘Scriptural Commentaries: The Psalter (Latin and English)’, ‘Treaties (Latin)’, ‘The English Epistles’, and ending with ‘Miscellaneous English Works’. Each work is updated to include any modern editions that have been published since 1927, the list of manuscripts Allen identified with corrections by Doyle and Hanna, and a list of additional manuscripts. Other details, such as references from medieval library catalogues and medieval wills, are also included and in some cases additional notes make reference to other texts with the same or similar incipit or on canonicity (p. xix).

Directly following this, Doyle and Hanna have reorganized Allen’s list of compilations containing extracts of Rolle’s works under the title ‘Formal Compilations derived from Rolle’s works’ (pp. 51–7). Allen’s ordering of the compilations had long been considered somewhat confusing, so the reordering of these works into eleven compilations, in roughly chronological order and with titles that are in more common usage today, is most welcome.

Doyle and Hanna’s volume concludes with a number of full and annotated indexes including a summary list of incipits of Rolle’s works, a list of some 400 surviving copies of Rolle manuscripts in alphabetical order, other manuscripts mentioned, and attested copies. The twenty-two-page list under the heading ‘Surviving Copies’ is noted by the authors as ‘probably the most immediately useful’ of the indexes because ‘in contrast to the text-centred presentation in the manuscripts lists (“how many copies of X?”), this allows a quick conspectus of the Rollean contents...