From the earliest nineteenth-century studies to even the most recent scholarship, Richard Rolle has persistently been treated as an eccentric figure: a singular individual who fled from the world to live as a hermit and who promoted a distinctive understanding of mystical rapture based on his personal experiences. Such a view of Rolle has been supported by an autobiographical reading of certain passages in his writings where the hermit cantankerously defends himself against his critics or offers his own acerbic attacks on those whom he considers feigned lovers of God. This essay presents an alternative to the longstanding view of this material as more revelatory of the “real” Rolle, arguing instead that the eccentric persona developed in such passages was one of the hallmarks of eremitic sanctity in the later Middle Ages, an indication of outsider status that was itself, perhaps counterintuitively, wholly conventional. Drawing on various vitae of hermit-saints, including some that seem to have been known to Rolle himself, I argue for an approach to Rollean idiosyncrasy as itself a self-consciously conventionalized voice, one that served, among other things, to shore up the hermit’s authority and to demonstrate his place in a tradition of eremitic sanctity.

Unlike other medieval English mystics, Richard Rolle does not tell us anything about what he saw in his rapturous experiences of the divine. There are no fantastic God-given images on which to meditate in his corpus, just as there are no clear equivalents to what Julian of Norwich called “words formed in [her] understanding,” such as her well-known teaching, “All manner of thing shall be well.” Instead, Rolle’s experiences involved his other senses—especially in his sensations of divinely granted heat and sweetness—while the angelic song he heard was, he says, nonverbal. This essay explores the ways in which Rolle’s unusual mystical claims set his writings apart from other examples of later medieval religious literature, focusing above all on the cultivation of the hermit’s presence by means of his textual surrogates. Drawing on recent historicist approaches to charismatic appeal, I argue that this presence-in-absence was both sought by Rolle and recognized as a unique source of his authority by readers across the fifteenth century. Ultimately, this writerly charisma helped to establish Rolle as what I call a “public contemplative,” crafting religious attitudes that were at once rarefied and accessible, transmitted and experienced in his writings.

Where and how did an avowedly peripatetic hermit, without formal ties to a religious order or other ecclesiastical institution, read books? While earlier studies of Richard Rolle have done crucial work identifying many of his major sources, this essay takes up the question of the conditions under which the Hermit of Hampole read, and the importance of those conditions for the creation of his texts. Focusing especially on his Latin prose, I argue that Rolle had only temporary access to some of the sources now typically considered his favorites, and across his career he developed strategies of quotation, compilation, and abridgement in order to continue to use—read, re-quote, gloss, develop, etc.—these texts even after he had left behind the books that bore them. The essay thus models an approach to source criticism inflected by recent developments in the study of material texts, and it presents a new framework for understanding Rolle as both a reader and an author, someone who wrote in order to read, and who seems to have spent his career building up his own small library of devotional literature.

In addition to his biblical exegesis and contemplative treatises, Richard Rolle was arguably the first named lyric poet writing in Middle English and certainly the first to achieve a wide readership. Yet, in part because his poems can be tied to a larger authorial program, they have tended to be read apart from other Middle English religious lyrics, interpreted instead in terms of the stages of contemplative progress outlined in his prose, with different lyrics offering meditative material appropriate to different stages. This essay offers a fresh approach to the hermit’s poetry, focusing on a series of lyrics that circulated apart from his treatises, and considering, in particular, their place in a single manuscript, London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 853. Rather than showing any concern for Rolle’s status as an elite contemplative, the scribe of Lambeth 853 copied these poems without attribution, and he seems to have been drawn to them because of their continuities with the larger collection of verse he was assembling. This essay traces the various formal features and intertextual reflexes shared by the poems assembled in Lambeth 853, thereby recovering a new facet of Rolle’s appeal as poet, the degree to which he could be read within a tradition of specifically pastoral verse. Indeed, the Lambeth compiler seems above all to be highlighting Rolle’s place in this larger, preexisting, and anonymous body of verse, one which the hermit adapted to suit his own contemplative purposes.

The spiritual diaries of Mount Grace Priory’s Richard Methley (d. 1527/28) and John Norton (d. 1521/22)—Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O.2.56 and Lincoln, Cathedral Library, MS 57, respectively—represent a striking departure from the conventional Carthusian practice of copying devotional texts that describe the spiritual experiences of others. Produced concurrently, with Methley and Norton evidently reading one another’s writings throughout, these diaries borrow extensively from Richard Rolle’s mysticism, adapting it for life in the charterhouse, where contemplation and liturgical responsibilities existed side by side. The texts assembled in these manuscripts reveal Norton and Methley’s careful attention not just to Rolle’s writings, but also to one another as confreres in a monastic setting, with the result that Rollean mysticism becomes a collaborative textual enterprise. Methley and Norton’s diaries are simultaneously private projects and shared documents attempting to reconcile the Carthusian injunction to “live in concord and chastity, in obedience and patience” with the Rollean admonishment to burst out in disruptive, irrepressible song. Rather than simply compiling and transmitting Rolle’s writing for solitary reading and rumination, then, Methley and Norton’s diaries explore the possibility that the solitary life championed by Rolle across his corpus might also, paradoxically, be a social one. Together, these texts suggest that hyper-personalized mystical experience might, through the social space of the manuscript, open itself up to fraternal love and care, and that mystical authorship might be a collaborative process rather than a solo endeavor.

Richard Rolle constructed a life, and a life’s work, in and with sound. Earlier studies have noted the aural quality of the hermit’s oeuvre, commonly assessing the melody of his mystical transport and the sonic patter of his texts as indexical vehicles for loftier spiritual truths. This essay seeks to do something different with Rollean sound: to shift the modality of our reading toward a radically open ear so we can listen to Rolle’s writings without translating their sonority otherwise. By following Rolle’s lead and repositioning literary experience away from signifying language toward the sounds through which language signifies, we come to appreciate Rolle as a sophisticated sense-maker whose mystical output invites us to theorize a medieval sound art. Adapting elements of Salomé Voegelin’s philosophy of sound art, this essay reconsiders one of the best-known Rollean episodes, the narration of his first audition of canor in Incendium amoris, and offers a reading of one of the least-studied Rollean texts, the alliterative prose-poem Gastly Gladnes. Encountering these texts through a practice of close listening allows us to notice how Rolle’s spiritual sensorium, lived practices, and texts cooperatively generate “sonic possible worlds,” spaces of futural sonic becoming that make bold claims to the nature of the true. Attended to with care, Rolle’s sound art spurs a radical reimagining of the aesthetic ambit and devotional invention of the late Middle Ages, even as it renovates our assessment of Rolle’s textual output and challenges the intellectual norms of literary scholarship.

Cambridge, University Library, MS T-S 10.K.22 was discovered in the Cairo Genizah and immediately drew the attention of scholars. While written in Hebrew script, it was found to contain a copy of a previously unknown epic—Dukus Horant—that relates a story highly reminiscent of major works in the medieval German canon. The enthusiasm with which the discovery of the poem was met, however, soon turned into a fierce controversy over continuous attempts to identify the work as either “Jewish” or “German.” The fact that the codex was discovered in Cairo of all places has indeed puzzled generations of scholars, but the poor state of its preservation invited much unfounded and ideologically inflected speculation regarding the whereabouts of its making and the circumstances that brought it to Egypt. The present essay offers a codicological study of the manuscript, which shows conclusively that indeed it was manufactured and copied in the eastern Mediterranean. The new data furthermore helps to reconstruct the hybrid intellectual environment of the region in which the manuscript was produced. These findings inform a new reading of the poem, as a Mediterranean object created for a community of displaced Ashkenazi Jews, a reading which subverts existing categories and destabilizes traditional theories on the history of vernacular literature.

This article explores the historiography of the medieval crusades in recent decades. It begins by questioning the usefulness of the compartmentalization of the field of crusade studies into “traditionalist,” “pluralist,” “generalist,” and “popularist” approaches, which has been employed for some time to describe different strands within modern crusade scholarship. It argues that the stark contrast between “traditionalists” and “pluralists” in particular has been overstated and does not accurately reflect the developments of recent research-based work on the crusades. As an alternative, this essay suggests viewing the field in terms of narrative traditions and examines how these traditions, which in some of their constituent elements reach all the way back to the Middle Ages, have been conserved and at the same time transformed in recent decades. It argues that, while textbook histories of the crusades still tend to follow traditional narrative patterns, specialist studies have for some time placed the medieval crusades in new thematic contexts. The article closes with an appeal to acknowledge recent approaches and results of specialist studies by expanding and reorientating the standard master narrative of the medieval crusades. It suggests that they should no longer only be viewed as part of a clash-of-cultures narrative mainly focusing on the geographical edges of Europe but also as a movement which affected and crucially shaped many aspects of mainstream European society during the Middle Ages.

This article proposes a new mode of sensory literary history, illustrated through an attentive reading of the sonic world the chronicler Gilles li Muisis creates in his account of the plague in Tournai in 1349. It shows that the blind chronicler presents sound as operating according to a plague-like logic of contagion, as he records songs, sermons, bells, and popular speech from within the walls of his quiet Benedictine monastery. A fuller consideration of this writer’s sonic environs, as well as the sound dynamics of his own compositional process, sheds new light on the auditory implications of his alternate choices of prose and verse, Latin and vernacular; and beyond the conclusions it draws about this one relatively little-known writer, it shows how more concentrated efforts at listening for medieval sonic cues can reveal significant sensory echoes in our own time.