The following chapters constitute a study both of Rolle's writing career as a whole and of most of his individual works. No literary study of Rolle has ever been written, and no general assessment of his career has been made in the sixty-odd years since the publication of Hope Emily Allen's Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle; moreover, except in the field of editing, Rolle scholarship has advanced with disappointing sluggishness in this period. Under these circumstances, two approaches to writing a literary-critical analysis offered themselves. One was to present Rolle's works so far as possible in terms of their literary relations, investigating sources and analogues of particular passages, concepts, and stylistic peculiarities, with a view to placing them squarely within the relevant literary and devotional traditions. Given our growing knowledge of the history of Anglo-Latin literature and of English devotion such an approach would be profitable, and is increasingly becoming a scholarly desideratum. The other approach, the one I decided to take, was to focus less on Rolle's affiliations with tradition than on his idiosyncrasies, and to try to account for these in terms of the internal logic of his works and career. In adopting this approach, I have of course had to introduce a good deal of background material into the introduction, the notes, and certain parts of the text, if only in order to be able to distinguish ‘tradition’ from ‘idiosyncrasy’. But so far as I can, I have told the highly particular story of Rolle's literary development as a self-coherent narrative in its own right.