Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: Contexts: three preliminary essays
- PART I
- PART II
- PART III
- PART IV
- 8 ‘Mixed’ life: Super Lectiones Mortuorum and Emendatio Vitae
- 9 ‘Mixed’ life: the English works
- Epilogue: Rolle as a late medieval Auctor
- Excursus I: The chronology of Rolle's writings
- Excursus II: Rolle's reading and the reliability of the Officium
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - ‘Mixed’ life: Super Lectiones Mortuorum and Emendatio Vitae
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: Contexts: three preliminary essays
- PART I
- PART II
- PART III
- PART IV
- 8 ‘Mixed’ life: Super Lectiones Mortuorum and Emendatio Vitae
- 9 ‘Mixed’ life: the English works
- Epilogue: Rolle as a late medieval Auctor
- Excursus I: The chronology of Rolle's writings
- Excursus II: Rolle's reading and the reliability of the Officium
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
There is a tendency in most of what has been said about Rolle in this century to assume that a great gulf is fixed between the writer of Melos Amoris and that of Emendatio Vitae and the English works (usually thought of as the main products of his ‘late’ period). The relative moderation of these latter is taken as evidence that towards the end of his life Rolle underwent a psychological or spiritual change, achieving at long last a measure of maturity and humility, and expressing himself in ways which not only avoid but seem actively to abhor his earlier stridencies. As Excursus i shows, Allen's chronology of his works was largely based on this principle, placing Melos Amoris and Emendatio Vitae as far apart as possible in date of composition, and positing a slow ‘mellowing’ of his personality to account for what she viewed as the increasing simplicity of his style. Arnould's edition of Melos Amoris, claiming (correctly) that the work must have been written towards the end of Rolle's life, made a brave attempt to establish it as the climax of a mystic's progress; but his best-qualified reviewer, Eric Colledge (Medium Aevum 27 (1958), p. 204), would have none of it, seeing the relationship between Melos Amoris and the last works (as Knowles was also to do (1961, p. 52)) only in terms of contrast: ‘One turns with relief to the simple spontaneity of the vernacular treatises, finding more of Everlasting Wisdom in the candid brevities of Ego Dormio or The Form of Living than in the repetitive asperities of [Melos Amoris].’
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- Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority , pp. 195 - 221Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991