Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: Contexts: three preliminary essays
- PART I
- PART II
- PART III
- 5 Contemplative life, Fervor: Incendium Amoris
- 6 Contemplative life, Dulcor: Super Psalmum Vicesimum, Super Canticum Canticorum, Contra Amatores Mundi
- 7 Contemplative life, Canor: Melos Amoris
- PART IV
- Epilogue: Rolle as a late medieval Auctor
- Excursus I: The chronology of Rolle's writings
- Excursus II: Rolle's reading and the reliability of the Officium
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Contemplative life, Fervor: Incendium Amoris
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: Contexts: three preliminary essays
- PART I
- PART II
- PART III
- 5 Contemplative life, Fervor: Incendium Amoris
- 6 Contemplative life, Dulcor: Super Psalmum Vicesimum, Super Canticum Canticorum, Contra Amatores Mundi
- 7 Contemplative life, Canor: Melos Amoris
- PART IV
- Epilogue: Rolle as a late medieval Auctor
- Excursus I: The chronology of Rolle's writings
- Excursus II: Rolle's reading and the reliability of the Officium
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Except for three brief experiments (Super Magnificat, Super Mulierem Fortem and Canticum Amoris), all the works considered so far as stages in Rolle's development have derived their form, and a high proportion of their material, from a source. Although only Judica Me makes this point directly, most of the auctoritas that these works may be deemed to possess is likewise borrowed, a product of the respect their readers feel for words and literary or religious structures which were used by, and are thus still redolent of, the precedentes patres (Judica Me 18.17). The tone we have seen these works striving, mostly successfully, to achieve is that of a professional, if on occasion warm, impersonality; only Canticum Amoris, and one passage at the opening of Judica Me, present the writer in a more immediate and individual way, the first in affective phraseology which is itself highly conventional, the second in language whose naive directness is probably inadvertent. As Incendium Amoris opens, by announcing as its subject the elucidation of its own passionate, and highly original, description of its author's experientia, it is immediately clear that the struggle to find a personal voice and a personal auctoritas has begun in earnest – that Rolle's writing career has entered a new, and crucially important, phase:
Admirabar [amplius] quam enuncio quando siquidem sentivi cor meum primitus incalescere, et vere non imaginarie, quasi sensibile igne estuare. […]
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- Information
- Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority , pp. 113 - 141Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991