The Wisdom of Richard Rolle

A Yorkshire hermit who taught the burning love of God in the silence of his cell, whose voice helped to invent English mystical literature, and whose writings outlasted the institutions that nearly canonized him.The Wisdom of Richard Rolle: Solitude, Sacred Song, and the Rise of English Vernacular Mysticism traces the life, writings, and lasting influence of the fourteenth-century English hermit whose contemplative theology shaped late medieval devotion and whose works were among the most widely copied religious texts in pre-Reformation England.Born around 1300 in Thornton Dale, Yorkshire, Richard Rolle left the schools of Oxford as a young man to live as a solitary on the northern moors. From decades of silent prayer he produced Latin treatises of remarkable sophistication and English epistles whose pastoral warmth still speaks today. At the heart of his teaching stood three experiences he named in Latin: heat, sweetness, and song.This volume follows the arc of his vocation across the Yorkshire moors: the dramatic flight from home, the patronage of northern gentry, the long wandering years, the final settlement at the Cistercian priory of Hampole, and the posthumous cult that nearly led to formal canonization. It examines his major writings, including Incendium Amoris, Melos Amoris, Emendatio Vitae, the English Psalter, and the vernacular letters of spiritual direction written for women preparing for religious enclosure.- The hermit's vocation in fourteenth-century Yorkshire and the social world that supported it- The threefold mystical experience of heat, sweetness, and inwardly heard celestial song- Devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus and the rise of affective English piety- The friendship with the anchoress Margaret Kirkby and the direction of women in religious life- Rolle's place in the lineage of the English mystics alongside Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and the Cloud author- The long afterlife of his writings from Carthusian copyists to modern scholarly recoveryWritten in a contemplative and historically grounded prose, this book offers a complete introduction to one of the most original voices of late medieval English Christianity.