Richard Rolle

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Richard Rolle of Hampole was a fourteenth-century English hermit and devotional writer, the earliest and most widely copied of the medieval English mystics, who described the height of the contemplative life as something physically felt: a warmth in the breast, a sweetness on the tongue, and an inward music.

The biographical record is thin and partly legendary, much of it drawn from an office composed by the Cistercian nuns of Hampole, in Yorkshire, who hoped to see him canonised. He was born around 1300 near Pickering, studied at Oxford, and left without taking a degree — the later account has him cutting up his sister’s gowns to fashion a makeshift hermit’s habit and fleeing his family. He spent the rest of his life as a solitary, moving among patrons in the north of England, and died in 1349, in the year the plague reached Yorkshire, near the priory at Hampole. The canonisation never came, but a local cult did, and his books spread.

What survives is a large body of Latin and English writing. The Incendium Amoris — The Fire of Love — is the best known: an intensely first-person account of the author’s own progress into contemplation. Rolle organised that experience around three words he returned to repeatedly: fervor, the heat he insisted he felt as real bodily warmth; dulcor, sweetness; and canor, the “song” into which his inner prayer seemed to turn. He was unusual in his readiness to describe his own sensations in detail and to treat them as the measure of spiritual attainment. His English works, among them The Form of Living and a commentary on the Psalter, were written for individual readers — often women under vows — and helped make sophisticated devotional teaching available in the vernacular.

His confidence in felt experience set him apart from the strand of English mysticism that distrusted exactly such feelings. The author of the Cloud of Unknowing, writing a generation later, warned against contemplatives who chase bodily warmth and sweet sounds and mistake them for God; the warning is widely read as aimed at Rolle’s imitators, if not at Rolle. Scholarship treats the two as the poles of a real fourteenth-century argument over whether the senses report anything trustworthy about the divine, or whether the surest path runs through unknowing and the stripping-away of every image.

Rolle was, by manuscript count, the most popular English religious writer of the later Middle Ages, copied and excerpted for two centuries before printing. That reach, more than the unrealised sainthood, is what fixed his vocabulary of fire and sweetness in the language of English devotion.

→ In the library: Gardner — The Cell of Self-Knowledge (Early English mystical treatises, 1910) · The Cloud of Unknowing (Underhill, 1912)

→ Related: St John Of The Cross · Gnosis · Middle Ages