world, though they seem happier, will be betrayed in the
end into eternal sorrow. The second major treatise, the
Incendium amoris, deals more specifi cally than any of
Rolle’s other writings with his experience of spiritual
heat, sweetness, and song and is more autobiographical
as well. Although focused on these themes, the Incen-
dium also treats discursively a number of theological
topics—yet it always returns to Rolle’s own spiritual
experience and to the idea that God’s contemplative
gifts to those who love him alone far outweigh the
worldly satisfaction of merely intellectual pursuits. The
Incendium was translated into ME, along with the
Emendatio vitae, by the Carmelite Richard Misyn.
The third of Rolle’s Latin treatises, the Melos amoris,
is in some ways the most diffi cult of his works to de-
scribe: highly alliterative in style and allusive in form,
it appears to represent and attempt to reproduce in
writing the transformation of contemplative prayer
into heavenly song that he describes as the culmination
of his spiritual experience. The probable aim of the
Melos is not so much persuasion as mystagogy—the
re-creation in the reader’s mind of the author’s spiritual
experience, which by grace the reader may also attain.
The style of the Melos has led many to regard it as an
immature work; but Arnould, its editor, has pointed out
that it more probably manifests the latest stage of his
spirituality.
Rolle’s most important epistolary tract, and by far his
most popular work, is the Emendatio vitae. This letter
and the parallel English Fo r m of Living are addressed
in some manuscripts to two of Rolle’s disciples—Wil-
liam (Stopes?) in the former case, Margaret Kirkby in
the latter—and are probably the last things he wrote.
Of particular importance in both is the treatment of the
“three stages of love”: insuperable, inseparable, and
singular. The treatises also exhort Rolle’s audience to
an immediate rejection of the world’s blandishments
and conversion to God in the eremitic life. The Fo r m of
Living was translated into Latin, and the Emendatio vitae
into English by Richard Misyn and no fewer than six
other, independent translators. The themes of the stages
of the love of God and the necessity of total conversion
to him also occur in Rolle’s two other English epistolary
tracts, the Commandment and the Ego dormio. Rolle
included a number of lyrics in the Ego dormio and
the Form of Living; a further collection of eight to ten
lyrics is attributed to him in two manuscripts. He also
wrote the Canticum amoris, a Latin hymn of praise to
the Virgin Mary.
Rolle’s reputation, like that of many infl uential medi-
eval writers, was so great that many works not written by
him came to be associated with his name. Hope Emily
Allen’s Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle has proven
decisive in establishing his canon, although her conclu-
sions regarding chronology and biographical references
must still be viewed with some skepticism.Teaching and Infl uence
The most distinctive feature of Richard Rolle’s spiri-
tuality is the experience of the graces of heat, sweet-
ness, and song that follows upon the total conversion
from the world to God. He is not always consistent in
the hierarchical and chronological ordering of these
graces, however; nor despite important similarities,
is their description entirely consistent with that of
the diree degrees of love—insuperable, inseparable,
and singular—found in the later epistles. These three
degrees apparendy derive From Richard of St. Victor’s
Quattuor gradus violentae charitatis, minus the fourth
(insatiable) degree.
For Rolle the rejection of the false pleasures of this
world and a complete conversion to God are the sine
qua non of the contemplative life, which he believes
is most fully lived in the eremitic life. He considered
the religious vocation to be comparatively worldly and
grouped members of religious orders together with other
lovers of this world.
The experience of heavenly song, with that of
sensible heat and sweetness in prayer, is particularly
characteristic of Rolle’s spirituality and that of his
followers. Certain sections of The Cloud of Unknow-
ing and of Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection and Of
Angels’ Song caution against using words like “heat,”
“sweetness,” or “song” too literally in describing spiri-
tual experience, a feet that suggests that this form of
affective mysticism was popular in the later 14th
century. These negative comments, together with
more positive presentations of this kind of affective
mysticism by Thomas Basset, Richard Methley, and
John Norton, can be taken as evidence for an informal
“school” of Richard Rolle.
Rolle achieved his greatest degree of popular infl u-
ence with the spread of the devotion (particularly in
lyric poetry) to the Passion of Christ and to the Holy
Name of Jesus. According to Knowlton the cult of the
Holy Name does not seem to have been prominent in
England, despite imitations of the “Dulcis Jesu Memo-
ria” and devotional pieces in the tradition of Anselm of
Canterbury’s Meditations, until after the time of Rolle.
A number of late-14th- and 15th-century ME lyrics
refl ect not merely these devotional themes but also the
phrasing of Rolle’s devotional poems and descriptions
of his own spiritual experiences. Rolle was not merely
the fi rst of the 14th-century English mystics; he also
had the greatest infl uence on popular piety before the
Reformation.
See also Hilton, WalterROLLE, RICHARD, OF HAMPOLE