PIMSPontifical Institute
of
Mediaeval Studies

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 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.

Author

Andrew Kraebel this year joins Rice University as Associate Professor of English, following a decade of teaching medieval English and Latin literature at Trinity University. His monograph Biblical Commentary and Translation in Later Medieval England: Experiments in Interpretation (2020) received the Ecclesiastical History Society’s book prize, as well as the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America. He is editor of The Sermons of William of Newburgh (2010) and, with Ardis Butterfield and Ian Johnson, of Literary Theory and Criticism in the Later Middle Ages: Interpretation, Invention, Imagination (2023). His essays have appeared in Speculum, Traditio, Mediaeval Studies, The Library, and other journals, as well as in various collections.

Endorsement

“This is a fine edition and translation of one of Richard Rolle’s most influential but at present least-known treatises, the last of a series made up of long postillae on biblical verses that were among the fruits of his productive later years. The Glosses on the Nine Lessons of the Dead, now made wonderfully accessible, remains as thought-provoking as it was for the monks, solitaries, and devout churchmen for whom it was written, presenting a chastened version of the voice of the ecstatic hermit who speaks in so many of Rolle’s works, yet preserving all his wonted urgency, brilliance, and shockingly confident independence from earlier authorities. Even those most knowledgeable about the English contemplative tradition will learn a great deal from Andrew Kraebel’s learned introduction, the product of sustained engagement with Rolle’s prolific writings and their rich manuscript tradition, which builds on and extends the deep reappraisal of this pivotal writer undertaken over the past decade. This book makes an indispensable contribution to the study of late-medieval Christianity, especially in England.” — Nicholas Watson, Harvard University

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