The English Manuscripts of Richard Rolle: A Descriptive Catalogue. By RALPH HANNA. (Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies.)

Abstract

Ralph Hanna's field of interest is described on a web page from Keble College, Oxford, where Hanna is a Fellow, as covering the use of medieval books, mostly books made in England, regardless of language, over the period from 700 to 1700. Indeed, his contribution to ‘the history of the book’ in England is unsurpassed and he has provided readers with an impressive corpus of scholarly discussions, edited works, and descriptive catalogues over a long career. The present descriptive catalogue of the English manuscripts of the Yorkshire hermit and visionary, Richard Rolle, is a work that Hanna ruefully admits ‘has been a remarkably long time coming to print’. Over some twenty years Hanna has researched, collected, and catalogued in excess of 120 manuscripts containing works attributed to Rolle, a medieval writer who was widely recognized in the later English Middle Ages as a major spiritual author and whose status, it is suggested, makes it appropriate that he will be the only Middle English author other than Chaucer to have an author-based bibliography. The catalogue follows the publication of a recent edited collection by Hanna, Richard Rolle: Uncollected Prose and Verse with Related Northern Texts (Oxford, 2007), which he had modestly described as being a ‘spin-off’ to the present catalogue. The twenty manuscripts re-edited or newly edited in this volume attest to Hanna's deep understanding of Rolle's textual nuances along with his exhaustive knowledge of the provenance of attributed manuscripts. This edited collection is also a fitting prelude to the catalogue in that it seeks to fill in the gaps that Hanna perceives in other editions of Rolle's works and, from the outset, defines itself in opposition to Sarah Ogilvie-Thomson's Richard Rolle: Prose and Verse (Oxford, 1988). Hanna has long complained about the marginalization of a number of Rolle's texts that did not appear in Ogilvie-Thomson's edition, and about the linguistically misrepresentative effect of her non-Northern based manuscript. The argument is continued in the catalogue with the inclusion of a table of equivalents to Ogilvie-Thomson's edition.