Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses to Warfare

Modern Language Review, The, July, 2005 by Andrew Breeze

For all his strangeness, Rolle dwells in one's mind. He reappears in modern anthologies (like Christopher Howse's Best Spiritual Reading Ever), speaking of the true love of Jesus as a hot fire 'so delightful and wonderful that it is beyond my telling. Then the soul is loving Jesus, thinking of Jesus, desiring Jesus, depending only on wanting him, sighing for him, burning for him, resting in him.' Such language suggests the presence of a spiritual and literary master, an English brother of St John of the Cross.

The English Prose Treatises of Richard Rolle will be the essential critical guide to Rolle's English prose. Like A Companion to Gower, it brings us close to a fourteenth-century man of letters and the landscape he inhabited. It can be recommended without hesitation to all concerned with the medieval literary life, as also students of readers, manuscripts, gender, and religion in the late Middle Ages; some of whom may wish to correct 'Lounpe' (p. 205) in the bibliography to 'Lampe', the name of Geoffrey Lampe, sometime professor of divinity at Cambridge University.

ANDREW BREEZE

UNIVERSITY OF NAVARRE, PAMPLONA