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Scholarly paper:

Timothy Glover, "The Original Text, Recipient, and Manuscript Presentation of Richard Rolle’s Emendatio vitae", Mediaeval Studies, 85 (August 29, 2025), érudit, 163-238.

Easier to assimilate and attractively prepared with striking illustrations:

Tom Almeroth-Williams, "The hermit’s best-seller:  The only surviving original version of one of late medieval England’s most popular works of literature reveals its secrets", University of Cambridge (1/5/26).

As an adulatory devotee of Geoffrey Chaucer, naturally I was transfixed by this news.

The only surviving original version of Richard Rolle’s Emending of Life, has been identified at Shrewsbury School, founded in 1552.

The 14th-century manuscript features unique elements, shedding new light on the work of a writer far more widely circulated than Geoffrey Chaucer.

The first detail that caught my attention is that this priceless manuscript was preserved in the rare book holdings of a private school dating back to Saxon times, Shrewsbury School’s Ancient "Taylor" Library (founded in 1606).  

In a paper published in Mediaeval Studies, Timothy Glover, a medieval literature researcher, demonstrates that manuscript "MS 25" in the Taylor Library contains the only complete surviving copy of Richard Rolle’s original draft of Emendatio vitae (The Emending of Life).  In his study, Glover explains how the hermit Rolle became "England’s most widely-read author in a period sandwiched between the Great Famine and the Wars of the Roses."

Richard Rolle (c.1300–1349) is one of the four or five authors known as the Middle English Mystics. Today, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe are widely published and celebrated. By comparison, Rolle has been neglected.

And yet, Rolle was the most widely circulated English writer of the late medieval period, making him one of the best known authors of his day. His work survives in more copies than for any other writer from the period in England. Over 650 manuscripts containing his work survive today, compared to roughly 144 for Chaucer.

I find it particularly intriguing that Rolle wrote both in Latin and in English:

Rolle mostly wrote in Latin but was among the earliest authors to write about advanced Christian teachings in English after the Norman Conquest. The best known of these English works is The Form of Living.

Rolle’s sophisticated religious texts gained a growing readership in the decades after his death. He was prayed to and developed a local following as a saint, despite not quite becoming one.

In contrast, Chaucer

…did not write his literary works in Latin; he wrote primarily in Middle English. While Latin and French were the standard languages for literature and the church in 14th-century England, Chaucer chose to write in the vernacular (common tongue), becoming the first court poet to do so. 

Primary Language: Chaucer’s masterpieces, such as The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, were written in Middle English.

Translation Work: Although he did not compose his original works in Latin, Chaucer was fluent in it and translated Latin texts into English, including Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy and The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris.

Influences: He drew heavily from Latin, French, and Italian sources, incorporating many of these words into his English writing.

By choosing English, Chaucer is often credited with legitimizing the language for literature. (AIO)

Back to Rolle, Glover found dozens of "literary fingerprints" left by him in MS 25 indicating that it was he who wrote this version of the text.  One of his favorites is "melliphono", which makes it a "sweet-sounding" smoking gun that it was Rolle who was the author of MS 25.

Rolle invented the word ‘melliphono’ to mean sweet-sounding and the word appears in several of his texts. The odds that a scribe would have come up with this made-up word as well are, Glover says, “vanishingly small”.

“Melliphono is a very Rolle word, he's all about this idea of spiritual song and experience of angelic heavenly music being the highest experience of God. He had an enormous Latin vocabulary and creatively deployed a huge range of very specific terms for music to explain his ultimate experience of God.”

“He’s using music as a metaphor for an inner experience. Like Augustine, he was sceptical of audible music and singing. Rolle talks of praying and having this experience of hearing music as if from above but also welling up inside him, and he says his meditation becomes song. He’s describing a free-flowing experience of divine love.”

This is a wonderful way for a mystic-hermit to look at language and music.

 

Selected readings

• "Memes, typos, and vernacular English in a 12th-century Latin homily" (7/20/25)
• "Richard Rolle" — WP

[Thanks to Mark Swofford and Mark Metcalf]

January 27, 2026 @ 12:18 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and history, Language and literature, Language and religion, Language change

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