Introduction

THANKS to the work of Horstmann in the last years of the nineteenth century, followed by the groundbreaking and monumental scholarship on Rolle's corpus by Allen, Richard Rolle stood as the better known and most influential of a group of authors of religious prose labelled as the Middle English mystics, which also included Walter Hilton, the Cloud-author, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. In addition, Chambers, in his influential piece on the continuity of English prose from the time of King Alfred to Sir Thomas More, gave Rolle a prominent place in the history of English prose, far above Wycliffe. Rolle's Middle English prose writings, although limited in number by comparison with his many major works in Latin, served nevertheless to demonstrate the use of the vernacular, in the dialect of Yorkshire, well before Chaucer turned English into a recognised and economically viable courtly literary language.

Chambers's project could not take into account Allen's significant discoveries of the Rolle corpus, which made of him a Latin author of considerable scope, who used the medium of Middle English, so to say, only incidentally. In a sense, the small number of works on which Chambers argued for Rolle's supreme place in the history of English prose made the claim look exaggeratedly inflated. From an altogether different perspective, a consideration of Rolle's entire corpus made the label ‘mystical writer’ much too tight a fit, for his contributions in Latin cover broad religious topics, in the form of pastoral manuals, theological tracts, scriptural commentaries and autobiographical mystical pieces. No longer able to fit into the garb that historical linguists, literary and theological scholars have meticulously woven for him, and never regaining the popularity that was his in the fifteenth century, the most popular of the mystical writers has now lost ground as a canonical author to the frequently anthologised Revelation of Love of Julian of Norwich and The Book of Margery Kempe. Although the literary canonisation of those female literary figures is amply justified, I would like to contend in this essay that a proper appreciation of the impact of Rolle's writings on late medieval religion in England (and on the Continent) illuminates our understanding of the religious culture in a unique way.