At the end of his career, the Yorkshire hermit and mystic Richard Rolle (d. 1349) wrote a Latin commentary on the passages from the Book of Job read in Matins in the Office of the Dead. Rolle worked carefully through each word and phrase of the familiar priestly devotion, showing how Job's words could and perhaps should be read and prayed by a true contemplative.
By turns preacherly and scholarly, precise and powerfully affective, with frequent recourse to the rapturous experiences of divine love that are now considered the hallmarks of Rolle's mysticism, this late work made the hermit's own preparation for death available for reflection and emulation long after he had shuffled off this mortal coil. The text circulated widely in pre-Reformation England, and as it moved beyond Rolle's close circle of earliest readers, it helped shape religious and literary attitudes in ways that have, until now, been unappreciated and unrecognized.
The present volume makes Rolle's Postille super novem lectiones mortuorum, or Glosses on the Nine Lessons of the Dead, accessible as never before. The critical edition of the Latin text, based on thorough examination of the manuscripts and early printed editions, faces an English translation that is at once careful and idiomatic. Text and translation are bookended by an extended historical introduction that also offers detailed descriptions of the manuscript witnesses and a commentary focusing on parallels and analogues in other works by the hermit in both Latin and Middle English. Rich with an abundance of archival material, the volume should serve as an important resource supporting work on the literature and devotional culture of later medieval England.
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