Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- 1 Richard Rolle, English Writer
- 2 “Ihesu louynge, Ihesu thynkynge, Ihesu desyrynge”: Affectivity, the Devotional Movement and Rolle's Implied Reader
- 3 “I wil becum a messager to bring þe to hys bed”: Ego Dormio
- 4 “A noble tretise of loue”: The Commandment
- 5 ‘A man or a womman þat is ordeynet to contemplatif lif’: The Form of Living
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Richard Rolle, English Writer
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- 1 Richard Rolle, English Writer
- 2 “Ihesu louynge, Ihesu thynkynge, Ihesu desyrynge”: Affectivity, the Devotional Movement and Rolle's Implied Reader
- 3 “I wil becum a messager to bring þe to hys bed”: Ego Dormio
- 4 “A noble tretise of loue”: The Commandment
- 5 ‘A man or a womman þat is ordeynet to contemplatif lif’: The Form of Living
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Rolle's date, his style and his popularity give him a supreme place in the history of English prose. In English or in Latin he was, during the latter half of the fourteenth century and the whole of the fifteenth, probably the most widely read in England of all English writers.
No literary study of Rolle has ever been written … moreover, except in the field of editing, Rolle scholarship has advanced with disappointing sluggishness.
RICHARD ROLLE produced one of the most extensive bodies of religious iliterature of the early fourteenth century; the bulk of this literature is exegetical, but some works are based on Rolle's own mystical experiences, and others can be considered as didactic works, composed specifically with a view to exhorting others to turn to the love of God. Rolle wrote in both English and Latin, more prolifically in the latter, but his works in both languages were widely disseminated throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; this is shown by the large number of surviving manuscripts of his Latin and English writings. Genuine works by Rolle exist in over five hundred extant manuscripts from this period, more than fifty of which contain his English writings, making him a more widely disseminated author than even the celebrated later fourteenth-century English writer Geoffrey Chaucer. It has been noted that in the fifteenth century alone a great many people must have dedicated their time to copying, translating and disseminating Rolle's output; presumably many more spent at least as much time reading him.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The English Prose Treatises of Richard Rolle , pp. 1 - 20Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2004