SOURCE· Hope Emily Allen, in an introduction to Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, D. C. Heath and Company, 1927, pp. 1-8.

[Since her standard works of 1927 and 1931, Allen has been recognized as a leading Rolle scholar. In the following excerpts from the introduction to her 1927 volume, Allen discusses her efforts to establish a canon of Rolle's writings; she was the first to argue that The Pricke of Conscience, previously considered one of his major works, had been wrongly attributed to him. She also briefly characterizes his mysticism, defending its nonconformity and "wildness. "]

As is true of most of the great mystics, Rolle's life and writings show a striking consistency, and discussion of his biography and of his mystical doctrine are both necessary to give the impression of consistency and idiosyncrasy in his character which is carried away by any one who has read extensively in his works. The literary historian has generally not read Rolle's writings, and he has therefore lost the key to Rolle's canon. Rolle was much read during the later Middle Ages in England, and the lists of manuscripts in the present volume will show that the medieval scribes on the whole did not blunder in their ascriptions. The most serious errors that have found their place in literary history have arisen from the exaggerated attention given by modern writers to medieval mistakes that were sporadic. When the testimony of all the medieval scribes and authorities is seen in the subjoined lists, it will appear that they always give a strong consensus of opinion. The descriptions of the works will offer internal evidence in agreement with the external evidence. Richard Rolle of Hampole would have been a most individual writer in any age, and in the authority-loving Middle Ages his individualism was not easily mistaken. The study of his canon is simplified as a result, and it may be said that almost no uncertainties enter it. In the early part of the work the only conjectures may be said to be those concerned with the dating, a subject which really makes part of the narrative of Rolle's life.

Some aspects of Rolle's character and teaching lent themselves to use by the Lollards, and were abused by them, but these were minor elements; the gospel of mysticism, consistently expressed in his life and writings, is what makes his influence on literary history, when studied from the contemporary sources. Rolle's readers quoted him constantly, and usually his most characteristic passages. The sensational English poem, the Prick of Conscience, is never quoted with his name, and it will be seen that the medieval evidence for connecting it with his authorship is negligible. Such evidence as we find is probably due to the existence of an interpolated text coloured by Lollardy, to which, as to an interpolated text of his English Psalter, his name was probably attached as a safe-conduct. In the end, his influence seems to have become one of the main currents in what may be called 'the Counter-Reformation' directed against Lollardy during the fifteenth century. We shall see that in spite of some heterodox tendencies in his works his books were owned not only by lay persons of high position, but also by ecclesiastics of high rank (cathedral dignitaries especially) and by religious houses (for example, by Westminster and Reading Abbeys, and even by Rievaulx and Foun tains, which we may imagine were hostile to Rolle in his lifetime). The popularity of Rolle's work at Syon and Shene Monasteries—the great royal foundations of the fifteenth century—is especially noteworthy, as will be later discussed in detail. It was natural that Carthusians (who were devoted to solitude) often owned his works, but there was a rift in Carthusian unity on the subject of Richard Hermit, for at least one prominent English Carthusian condemned his influence, saying that his writings 'made men judges of themselves'.

Probably at the time of the Reformation 'Richard Hermit's' influence was as great as, or greater than, that of any other medieval English writer of devotional works. The 'cult of the Holy Name of Jesus', in which his, though far from being the only, had probably been the decisive influence, had permeated general popular devotion. A 'Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus', with an office in nine lessons, had been established in the calendars of Sarum, York, &c, with such a pressure of popular devotion behind it that it was able to survive the great change, and to pass over into the calendar of the Church of England, where it still remains. Its persistence has real meaning, for it signifies a concentration of devotion on the Saviour, with the personal warmth more often in medieval times offered to His Mother, or to a saint. This was a characteristic of the later Middle Ages in England which doubtless made easy the simplification of devotion brought about when the cults of saints were swept away at the Reformation. Thus the Festival of the Holy Name of Jesus perpetuates a strain in Richard the hermit's influence which links him with English religious history up to modern times.

Rolle's influence was probably greatest at the time of the invention of printing, and some of his works were edited in the early days of the press. Strangely enough, all but one of the early editions of Rolle were printed on the Continent, where his writings were utilized in the Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth century. Several early English editions give spurious works with his name. Strangely enough, he was not used by the seventeenth-century English Benedictines, Father Baker¹ and Father Cressy, who used other fourteenthcentury English mystics, and the continental editions gave the last signs of Rolle's living influence on religious history visible until the revival of interest in mysticism of the last few decades. Horstmann's volumes brought Richard into notice at a time when mysticism was again beginning to be popular among the readers of devotional literature, and Rolle's works have since appeared in modernized editions and been given their full significance in the history of mysticism. Horstmann's work, however, was neither complete nor systematic, and any one interested in the hermit was at a loss to find satisfactory information on his life and writings. So far as possible the raw material for the study of Rolle's life and work will be given in the present volume, and readers can verify all con clusions for themselves….

In conclusion, something should be said as to the meaning in which the words 'mystic' and 'mysticism' are used in the following pages. It should be said at once that Rolle was the simplest possible type of mystic, and accordingly the term 'mysticism' is used in the present work in the broadest possible meaning. He was not given to philosophies nor to apocalypses, and his mysticism depended on the personal and emotional element in his religion. When described from his point of view, it may be defined as a Divine transmutation of his inner life. It was a relation with the Divinity which was not only an influence transforming his consciousness, but was also directly personal. To Rolle, the Divinity was 'Jesus', who was his friend. He held a highly spiritualized and emotionalized conception of friendship, and his friend out of friendly favour granted him, while in this life, a share in celestial experience. Thus Rolle's mysticism meant a concentration of the affections, and a resulting experience of celestial joy. In his own words (as given in two Latin works), contemplation was 'joy of the Divine love taken in the mind with the sound of the heavenly melody'. In an English work he calls it 'a wonderful joy of God's love'. 'That joy', he goes on, 'is in the soul, and for abundance of joy and sweetness it ascends into the mouth, so that the heart and the tongue accord in one, and body and soul rejoice, living in God.' Here we have indicated both the supernatural and the sensuous elements which generally go to make up the mystic's experience, and we have also the emphasis on joy which specially distinguishes Rolle and the mystics of his type. Other mystics in various ways emphasize knowledge, but with these he has very little kinship. His mysticism is not so much a revelation as a life, and that life is joy….

Since, in the following pages, the establishment of Rolle's canon has been the main enterprise, his most extravagantly individual passages have naturally been chosen for quotation. As a result, it is the undisciplined strains in his character that have perhaps especially been brought to the attention: he has often appeared as a selfwilled, bitter individualist, something very far from our conception of a Christian saint. This was the impression that he made in his own time on a few readers, as we shall see in the appendix, but it was not the general impression, for he seems to have been esteemed among a very wide circle. The truth is that in his youth sanctity and unregenerate bitterness were strangely mixed in Rolle, but from the first he gave flashes of rare mystical fervour, and of profound devoutness, and, by the end of his life, his works altogether express in a chastened and beautiful manner an idyllic romance, as it were, of the religious life. The later compositions, the four epistles (one in Latin, three in English), have perhaps not been quoted here sufficiently for their virtues to appear. They will probably rank among the classics of the devotional literature of England.

Though the fierceness of Rolle's early moods may disturb the impression of his holiness for some temperaments, this very wildness probably for some readers in the scholastic age had its own attraction of novelty and of vitality. We can use for the reader of Rolle what was recently written for the reader of Blake: 'The buzz of powerful words, the rocking motion of long rhythms, will keep him comatose and inflated in imagination.'² If only these moods had been expressed in English, even they might have given us something memorable. As it is, we have them in a bastard Latin, which bores and repels. By the time Rolle died, he had learned a delicate English style that makes us regret his loss the more. First, by his writing Latin, then by his death in mid career, we seem to have suffered one of the premature losses in English literature. In Rolle the later Middle Ages had an English prose-writer of great promise and of some achievement. On the whole he writes like a modern, but it is his peculiar charm that at times the Anglo-Saxon literary traditions break through, giving his prose cadences and ornaments archàic, but in his case, instinctive. Thus he gives the rare, perhaps unique, example of a style truly belonging to the Middle Age of English prose—something that inherits from the rich national literature before the Conquest as well as from the international traditions of writing brought over by the Normans (which now monopolize our literary expression). Fortunately Rolle's compositions sometimes expressed the vivacity of his temperament, and they sometimes therefore seem to give us the veritable utterances of a medieval Englishman, speaking with the human directness and intelligibility of a modern.

Notes

¹ Father Baker seems to have modernized the Remedy Against Temptations which was printed by Wynkyn de Worde as Rolle's though it was not his (J. N. Sweeney, Father Augustine Baker, London, 1861, p. 92, and infra, p. 360).

² Alan Porter in The Spectator, June 26, 1926, p. 1086.