Richard Rolle: The Fifteenth-Century Translations by Tamás Kárath

Abstract

Reviewed by: Richard Rolle: The Fifteenth-Century Translations by Tamás Kárath Claire McIlroy Kárath, Tamás, Richard Rolle: The Fifteenth-Century Translations (Medieval Church Studies, 40), Turnhout, Brepols, 2018; hardback; pp. xii, 370; 9 b/w illustrations, 6 b/w tables; R.R.P. €100.00; ISBN 9782503577692. As the title suggests, this volume is focused on the numerous translations of Richard Rolle’s English and Latin works made during the fifteenth century. In what is an impressively in-depth exploration of the editorial actions of Rolle’s translators, Karáth investigates how the fourteenth-century hermit and writer acquired the labels he is best known by today—‘the father of English prose, the first author, the first known mystic of English literature, the runaway Oxford man, the major figure of the Northern eremitic movement, and the misogynist’ (p. 13). His analysis of Rolle in translation both highlights the various meanings, practices, and implications of translation in the fifteenth century and thoughtfully challenges current thinking to discuss translation as effectively having ‘its own cultural history’ (p. 1). Karáth explains that his book ‘problematises translation as a series of episodes in a long process of transforming cultural discourses and social mentalities’, with the aim of answering some broad underlying questions about the shaping of the authority of Rolle in late medieval literature: Why was Rolle an appropriate author to translate in the fifteenth century? Do copies and compilations of Rolle material (in its original language) on the one hand and translations of Rolle on the other shape his authority in the same ways, or do they create alternative portraits of the same author? Ultimately, is there a fifteenth-century Rolle emerging from the translations of his writings? (p. 2). Karáth’s book is divided into four chapters, beginning with a discussion of Rolle’s sensory mysticism (widely criticized by the ensuing generation of mystics) to explore the different voices Rolle adopts in his writings. The second chapter covers the scant Latin translations of two of Rolle’s English works, The Form of Living and Ego Dormio. The third examines the translation into English of the Latin Incendium amoris by the only named translator of Rolle’s works, Richard Misyn, and provides refreshingly new insights into Misyn’s translation strategies as he endeavoured to temper some of Rolle’s more sensuous language for a lay vernacular audience. The final chapter deals with the abundant English translations of Rolle’s popular Latin work Emendatio vitae, exploring how various translators ‘interfered’ with Rolle’s affects to create ‘a more disciplined model of performing affects and cutting Rolle’s agitated eccentricities’ (p. 237). In conclusion, Karáth finds that the fifteenth-century translations shaped not so much a new Rolle [End Page 265] but a ‘new authority of Rolle’ (p. 239) that reflects the cultural and devotional transformations of the period. Claire McIlroy The University of Western Australia Copyright © 2020 Claire McIlroy