Richard Rolle

This volume offers a critical edition and translation of one of Richard Rolle’s final Latin writings, together with an extensive historical introduction, notes, and commentary. Rolle works carefully through each word and phrase of the nine passages from Job read in Matins in the Office of the Dead, 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. This work’s influence on the educated English clergy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries made it a major contributor to Christian attitudes toward death and dying in the later medieval English Church.

Preface
Sigla
Conventions and Abbreviations

Introduction
I. Author and Work
II. Manuscripts and Early Print Editions
III. Classification of the Witnesses
IV. The Edition
Plates

RICHARD ROLLE
Postille super novem lectiones mortuorum
Glosses on the Nine Lessons of the Dead

Lesson 1: Job 7:16–21
Lesson 2: Job 10:1–7
Lesson 3: Job 10:8–12
Lesson 4: Job 13:22–28
Lesson 5: Job 14:1–6
Lesson 6: Job 14:13–16 1
Lesson 7: Job 17:1–3 and 11–15
Lesson 8: Job 19:20–27
Lesson 9: Job 10:18–22

Commentary
Appendix: Interpolations
Bibliography
Index biblicus