The Yorkshire hermit Richard Rolle of Hampole (c. 1290–1349) wrote an extensive body of religious literature that was widely disseminated in late medieval England. Today, while many of his works have received substantial editorial attention they have as yet attracted only limited detailed critical analysis. Instead, Rolle scholarship to date has been largely focused on explicating his popular reputation and offering psychological profiles of his striking personality. These are mainly drawn from autobiographical extracts in his Latin writings, and details of his life found in the hagio-biography composed in anticipation of his canonisation. Rolle's writings have thus been subsumed within a scholarship preoccupied with establishing facts about his life and character. His English works in particular, even though much of his modern fame rests with his status as a “Middle English Mystic”, have received little critical attention due to their lack of personal content.

My book therefore aims to revisit the English prose works of this prolific writer in terms of their literary form, content and appeal rather than their relationship to Rolle's biography. In the introductory sections I look closely at what I consider to have been the major critical preoccupations with his biography so far: the construction of his own authority, the appraisal of his authenticity as a mystic, and the gendering of his English writings as male-authored works for a specifically female audience. In turn, Rolle's construction of audience in his English works is examined in relation to the tradition of affectivity, the rise of the devotional movement in the fourteenth century, and the development of reader-engaging strategies in late medieval devotional literature.