THE ORIGINAL TEXT, RECIPIENT, AND MANUSCRIPT PRESENTATION OF RICHARD ROLLE’S EMENDATIO VITAE

Richard Rolle was a fourteenth-century hermit and religious writer, famed as the most widely circulated author who wrote in Middle English. He wrote in Latin as well, and his works survive in over six hundred manuscripts. An ongoing resurgence of scholarly interest in Rolle has been fueled in part by scholars turning away from the psycho-biographical approaches of earlier research and looking instead to more empirical information about Rolle’s texts and their transmission found in medieval books. However, studying Rolle’s transmission involves certain difficulties. Rolle was a hermit, with no known institutional connections to preserve or systematically disseminate his work. There are few early manuscripts, and no holographs survive. The earliest collections of his work seem to represent several independent attempts to piece together a corpus that had already been dispersed and dismembered. Thus, virtually all bibliographic evidence is at several removes from the original forms and contexts in which Rolle spread his texts (if he himself even did so). We have little evidence of how Rolle disseminated his work or who his initial readers were: crucial questions for understanding Rolle’s aims as an author and why he wrote anything at all.