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2 - Recommended Reading: Richard Rolle in Bohemia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2023

Peter Brown
Affiliation:
University of Kent, Canterbury
Jan Čermák
Affiliation:
Charles University, Prague
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Summary

The writings of Richard Rolle, a fourteenth-century English hermit and contemplative, were among the most widely read texts in late-medieval England, written in both English and Latin. His Latin writings also circulated in impressive quantities on the European continent, with marked concentrations in central Europe. With the benefit of recent discoveries in Bohemian and related manuscripts, this chapter shows that Bohemia and its vicinity was the site of some of the most intensive copying of Rolle's Latin texts. This activity took place during two main stages – beginning in Prague, and then fanning outward to southern Bohemia, Moravia, Poland, Austria and Germany. Nor was it the case that Rolle's texts finally reached Bohemia after sweeping across parts of Europe that lie further to the west. Nearly all of them were transmitted directly to Prague from England, and they fanned outwards from there through subsequent copying. Further, this activity appears to have begun earlier than most circulation of Rollean texts elsewhere on the continent. There is inconsistent evidence, however, that Bohemian readers knew much about Rolle in his own right. Some copies of his texts reveal confusion about who he was, and his writings turn up in diverse contexts, participating in a heterogeneous intellectual and devotional environment. Clearly Rolle's texts were widely circulated and respected in central Europe (particularly Bohemia), yet Rolle's own reputation as an author was perhaps less of a reason for that phenomenon than it was in England.

The most active period of Anglo-Bohemian cultural contact, between the 1380s and the Council of Constance (1414–18), was marked by an impressive amount of textual transmission, mainly in the direction of Bohemia, which was at that time the political heart of the Holy Roman Empire. There was high demand in the empire for texts from across Europe, and the Anglo–Imperial alliance, formed in part to support the cause of the Roman pope during the Great Schism, helped facilitate the movement of people, books and other goods be tween these two regions in particular. For years, manuscript production in the empire proceeded at a greater pace than in any other European region, a trend that began during the Schism and continued through the introduction of print.

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Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2023

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