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.

Richard Rolle depicted as a hermit in the early-fifteenth-century poem “The Desert of Religion” (British Library, Cotton MS Faustina B.VI) — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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 at Thornton, near Pickering in the North Riding, and was sent to Oxford at the expense of Thomas de Neville, later archdeacon of Durham. He left without taking a degree — by his own report and the later tradition alike, repelled by the disputatious temper of the schools and the subtleties of scholastic argument rather than by any want of learning. The legend that crystallized around his beginnings has him returning home at about nineteen, cutting up two of his sister’s gowns and taking his father’s rain-hood to fashion a makeshift hermit’s habit, and fleeing his family when his sister cried that her brother was mad. He found a first patron in John de Dalton of Pickering, who gave him a cell, and thereafter lived the wandering life of a solitary, moving among patrons and religious houses across the north of England — a freelance hermit without the formal enclosure of an anchorite, which drew both admiration and suspicion. He died in 1349, in the year the plague reached Yorkshire, near the priory at Hampole, where he had become spiritual director to the nuns. The canonisation never came, but a local cult did, and his books spread.

The conversion at nineteen and the question of authority

What gives Rolle’s writing its unusual charge is that he made his own experience the standard of attainment. He set the date of his decisive conversion at the age of nineteen and described, in detail he treated as evidential rather than ornamental, the sensations by which he knew grace was present. Where most medieval contemplative writers wrote with the modesty of a craft passed down — citing the Fathers, the Scriptures, the authorised masters — Rolle wrote as a man reporting what had happened to him and inviting the reader to measure spiritual progress against it. Nicholas Watson’s study Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority (1991) reads this as the deliberate construction of a new kind of vernacular authority: lacking ordination to a teaching office and the credential of a degree, Rolle grounded his right to instruct in the felt reality of his own union with God. The hermit’s cell, in this reading, became a pulpit licensed by experience.

Fervor, dulcor, canor

Rolle organised that experience around three Latin words he returned to repeatedly, and which his readers learned to treat as a graded sequence. The first is fervor — also calor, heat — the warmth he insisted he felt as real bodily warmth, not a figure of speech. In the Incendium Amoris, The Fire of Love, he recounts being startled to find his breast physically hot, putting his hand to it to be sure the heat was not from some outward cause, and recognising it as a gift poured into the soul. The second is dulcor, sweetness, a deepening of the joy of contemplation into something tasted as well as felt. The third and highest is canor, the “song” into which his inner prayer turned — not music heard with the ears nor music made aloud, but an interior melody, a participation in the praise of the angels, into which thought itself resolved. He celebrated canor most fully in the Melos Amoris (The Melody of Love), a work of densely alliterative, incantatory Latin prose whose very texture imitates the heavenly song it describes. The sequence is cumulative: heat gives way to sweetness, and sweetness ripens into song, with canor reserved for the rarest and most advanced state.

He was unusual, even singular among English writers of his century, in his readiness to describe his own sensations at this length and to treat them as the measure of spiritual attainment. The claim cut against an older monastic reticence, and Rolle knew it; much of the Incendium is an argument that the warmth and the song are genuine and not delusions of an overheated devotion. The Emendatio Vitae (The Mending of Life), by contrast, is his most orderly and least personal work, a graduated rule of the contemplative ascent that circulated very widely as a practical manual — the difference between the two showing that Rolle could write both the rhapsody and the rule.

The English works and the women under vows

Alongside the Latin treatises stands a body of English writing that did as much as anything in the century to make sophisticated devotional teaching available in the vernacular. The Form of Living — the longest and most influential of his English prose works — was composed in the last year of his life for Margaret Kirkeby, a young woman who entered enclosure as a recluse on 12 December 1348 at Layton, near Richmond, and who afterward did much to preserve and circulate his writings. It is, in effect, the first vernacular guide for a recluse since the Ancrene Wisse a century before. With the shorter Ego Dormio and The Commandment, it forms a small group of epistolary treatises written for individual readers, often women under vows, who could not read the Latin in which most spiritual direction was conducted.

His commentary on the Psalter exists in two recensions, a Latin Expositio leaning on Peter Lombard’s catena and an English version closely following it, the latter among the earliest substantial works of biblical commentary in English prose. Its afterlife is one of the more telling episodes in his reception: within a generation of his death, Lollard writers revised and interpolated the English Psalter, fitting its plain vernacular exposition to their own reforming program — so that the orthodox hermit’s most pastoral book passed, partly transformed, into the hands of a movement the Church was moving to suppress. The textual scholarship around the canon is itself a long correction. Carl Horstmann’s Yorkshire Writers (1895–96) printed an inflated body of “Rolle” pieces; Hope Emily Allen’s Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle (1927) systematically pared the canon back, dis-attributing much that the manuscripts had carried under his name, and her work remains the foundation on which the modern, narrower Rolle stands.

The argument with the Cloud

His confidence in felt experience set him apart from the strand of English mysticism that distrusted exactly such feelings. The anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing, writing a generation later, warned the contemplative against those who chase bodily comforts — heat felt in the breast, sweetness in the mouth, wonderful sounds and gladness — and mistake these sensible consolations for God himself, cautioning that the inexperienced are most easily deceived by them. The warning is widely read as aimed at Rolle’s imitators, if not at Rolle directly: the two stand 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 — the apophatic way descending from Pseudo-Dionysius and carried, in its Latin contemplative form, by the Cistercian tradition of bridal love into which Rolle’s own affective register reaches back. Rolle’s path is the sensory and affective one; the Cloud-author’s is the dark and imageless. Whether the Cloud-author’s caution names Rolle himself or only the less disciplined enthusiasts who took his descriptions as a program to be reproduced is debated, and the texts do not settle it; what is clear is that by the later fourteenth century the felt warmth Rolle had reported as a grace had become, for some readers, a thing to be sought, and for others a thing to be guarded against.

Within the wider field of Christian mysticism, Rolle holds the affective-experiential pole — closer in temperature to the heat-and-sweetness language of Bernard of Clairvaux than to the negative theology of Meister Eckhart, and distinct again from the theology of divine love worked out by his younger countrywoman Julian of Norwich. His asceticism is not the point and never the goal; the solitary discipline is the clearing in which the heat, the sweetness, and the song can be received.

Texts and scholarship

The primary record divides cleanly into the works and the office. For the felt experience itself, the most accessible English route is Frances Comper’s modernisation of Richard Misyn’s fifteenth-century translation of the Incendium Amoris and the Emendatio Vitae, with Evelyn Underhill’s introduction (The Fire of Love, 1914) — the edition that did most to fix Rolle’s place beside the Cloud-author and Julian in the early-twentieth-century English revival, though its devotional framing is now read against more historicist scholarship. The English prose treatises, including The Form of Living written for Margaret Kirkeby, survive in public-domain text (The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises, 1910). The documentary basis for the cult is the office and miracle-collection edited as The Officium and Miracula of Richard Rolle of Hampole, composed at the priory c. 1381–82 and the source of most of the legendary biographical detail. The Middle English scholarly tradition runs from Carl Horstmann’s Yorkshire Writers (1895–96), whose attributions were corrected by Hope Emily Allen’s Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle (1927); the modern critical understanding of Rolle as a constructed vernacular authority is owed above all to Nicholas Watson’s Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority (1991), with Anne Hudson’s editions tracing the Lollard revision of the English Psalter and Andrew Albin’s work recovering canor as the governing category of the Melos Amoris.

Cult, office, and afterlife

No canonisation followed, but Hampole kept his memory with a will. About 1381–82 an Officium et Miracula — a liturgical office for a feast on 20 January, together with a collection of miracles ascribed to his intercession — was composed at the priory in the hope of a sainthood that never arrived.

A cottage now occupies the site of Hampole Priory, the Cistercian nunnery in South Yorkshire where Rolle spent his last years and was buried — JohnArmagh, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Pilgrims came to his tomb; the office was sung; the local observance persisted without ever being ratified by Rome. The far larger afterlife was textual. By manuscript count Rolle was the most widely read named English writer of the later Middle Ages, his works surviving in nearly four hundred English copies and at least seventy on the Continent, most of them written between roughly 1390 and 1500 — a wider dissemination than that of Geoffrey Chaucer in the same period. The Emendatio Vitae and the Incendium Amoris travelled across Europe in Latin; the English treatises and the Psalter circulated, copied and excerpted and recombined, for two centuries before printing fixed the canon and the scholars began to unfix it again. That reach, more than the unrealized sainthood, is what set his vocabulary of fire and sweetness and song into the working 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 · The Cloud Of Unknowing · Julian Of Norwich · Christian Mysticism · Mysticism · Bernard Of Clairvaux · Apophatic Theology · Asceticism · Meister Eckhart · Pseudo Dionysius The Areopagite