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.

By Tom Almeroth-Williams

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

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

How does a hermit become England’s most widely-read author in a period sandwiched between the Great Famine and the Wars of the Roses?

It’s a question many scholars have considered but a once-in-a-lifetime discovery by Dr Timothy Glover brings us closer than ever to the enigmatic author Richard Rolle.

In a study published in Mediaeval Studies, Dr Glover, a medieval literature researcher, demonstrates that manuscript ‘MS 25’ in Shrewsbury School’s Ancient 'Taylor' Library contains the only complete surviving copy of Richard Rolle’s original draft of Emendatio vitae (The Emending of Life).

He also shows that all other copies known to survive actually contain an abridged version made by someone else.

This makes the manuscript one of the earliest surviving collections of Rolle’s work in Latin. The priceless text offers unique insights into how Rolle worked, disseminated his writing and who his initial reader was.

“I'm the only person since the Middle Ages to have read this knowing that it’s Rolle’s original,” Dr Glover says. “It's such an important manuscript and it offers a direct connection with an author who deserves far greater recognition.”

“Medieval people struggled with distractions as we do today. They were trying to still their wandering minds. Rolle offered practical strategies to help, and some people treated him like a saint for it.”

Dr Glover published his findings while working at Corpus Christi College, following a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College. He recently moved to the University of Bergen.

Leo Winkley, Headmaster of Shrewsbury School, said:

“This is an extraordinary discovery for Shrewsbury School. We are honoured to be the custodians of the original and only surviving complete version of Richard Rolle’s Emendatio vitae since it was gifted to the School in 1607. The manuscript reveals the text as it was actually written by one of the most influential English authors of the medieval period.

“It is also a powerful reminder of the depth and continuity of our Ancient 'Taylor' Library, founded in 1606 as a place of universal learning for the pupils of Shrewsbury School. The Library holds an exceptional range of material, including medieval manuscripts, incunabula printed before 1500, Newton’s Principia, and books and manuscripts associated with figures such as Samuel Butler and Old Salopian Charles Darwin."

Shrewsbury School's Ancient 'Taylor' Library

Shrewsbury School's Ancient 'Taylor' Library

Shrewsbury School’s manuscript MS 25

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.

Rolle lived as a hermit in Yorkshire, and may have died from plague. In the Middle Ages, he was known as ‘Richard the hermit’ or ‘Richard of Hampole’. Hampole was the site of a Cistercian nunnery in South Yorkshire, where Rolle is thought to have mentored nuns – it may also have been the location of his burial or shrine.

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.

Richard Rolle depicted c.1400 in Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc 528, fol2v.

Discovering Rolle’s original Emendatio vitae

Emendatio vitae is Rolle’s most widely circulated work. It offers his account of the spiritual life in twelve stages, starting from the most basic: turning towards God and away from the world. It then moves up through prayer and meditation to contemplation and the love of God.

He writes about his contempt for worldliness and then offers more pragmatic advice on living virtuously, dealing with sin, praying and meditating.

Glover says: “As a hermit, Rolle probably didn't have a regular access to an institutional library and he rarely tells us what he's been reading. To try to find out, I went looking for early copies of his work.”

Shrewsbury School’s manuscript ‘MS 25’ was on Glover’s list.

“I spent all day taking photos of the manuscript so it wasn’t until I got back to the hostel that I noticed an excerpt attached at the end which described six different kinds of dreams. I’d seen something similar in one of Rolle’s English texts, The Form of Living, so I compared them and realised they were identical. That was my Eureka moment.”

The manuscript has been known to scholarship since the 1920s but in 2009, a German study compared all 120 copies trying to deduce the original form of the text. It concluded that the Shrewsbury School manuscript was a copy containing extra passages added by an unknown individual, and that its dedication was a forgery. Glover forensically proves that both claims are incorrect.

Like virtually all medieval manuscripts, it was not physically written out by the author himself. This copy was made several decades after Rolle’s death. Crucially, however, unlike all the other surviving copies, this one preserves the author’s complete original text. And Glover suggests it could even be a duplicate of a manuscript Rolle made himself.

Opening of a chapter on prayer in Richard Rolle's Emendatio vitae

Chapter on avoiding sin in Rolle's Emendatio vitae

A “sweet-sounding” smoking gun

Among dozens of literary fingerprints left by Rolle in the manuscript, Glover argues that “the presence of the word ‘melliphono’ is a smoking gun that Rolle wrote this version of the text.

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.”

Dedication

The text is dedicated to ‘William’ and Glover is convinced that this dedication is authentic and by Rolle. Glover points out that the wording closely resembles Rolle’s dedication to Margaret Kirkby – an anchorite and previously a Hampole nun – in The Form of Living.

The name 'Willelme' is split between lines. Translated into English, the dedication reads:

‘Behold, William, in a few words I have described the form of living. If you wish to follow it, without doubt you will attain great perfection. And, when it has been well for you, remember me, who spurred you on (to the extent that I could) so that it would turn out well for you.’

William was a common name in the Middle Ages but Glover suggests a likely candidate for Rolle’s dedication: a monk from Yorkshire named William Stoups.

Glover notes that we only know the names of two associates of Rolle: one is Margaret Kirkby and the other is a William Stoups. A collection of Rolle’s writing which made it to Prague in the early 15th century contains marginalia claiming that Stoups translated Rolle’s English into Latin. This was inaccurate because Rolle wrote his own Latin but it leaves little doubt that Stoups and Rolle knew each other.

Previous research by Prof Ralph Hanna points out that Stoups is an unusual name, unlikely to have been invented, that there was a Stoups family in Yorkshire in the period, including one called William and that he may have been a monk at Meaux Abbey in Yorkshire.

Glover says: “We can’t be certain but it is a striking coincidence. The possibility that Rolle dedicated this text to William Stoups adds to this sense that he was much better connected than we’ve previously assumed. He had human contact and this helped to ensure that his writings travelled a long way and reached many more people.”

“Rolle has been cast as a bad hermit, an isolated hostile figure living an unconventional religious life. The possibility that a monk at a wealthy abbey would go to him for spiritual guidance reinforces the sense that actually he was accepted as an authority.”

Recognising a great writer

Versions of Rolle’s Emendatio vitae in print today lack many of his original sentences. And as scribes copied this text, they replaced much of his more unusual and creative language with something more conventional.

“Someone cut out lots of Rolle’s original words,” Glover says. “Reading Rolle’s original restores his craft and creativity.”

The Shrewsbury manuscript shows us that Rolle was reading many different books and that he often appended excerpts to his texts. This has implications far beyond this text, because this approach shaped his important work in English and the tradition of women’s religious writing which developed from it.

“I admire Rolle as a writer,” Glover says. “He was a messy writer. He didn’t always write in a very poetic way but when he did, he rivals the great Latin religious writers of the Middle Ages.”

Rolle’s writing can have an aggressive or defensive tone but, Glover notes, it can also be extraordinarily generous. Rolle aimed to write for all, ‘for the simple and the untaught’. And in Emendatio vitae, he insisted that ‘the virtue of love is worth incomparably more than all abstinence or fasting or other works.’

Glover says: “Rolle was at his most experimental and charismatic when writing in Latin. His big idea was that the highest experience of God was an experience of song. And his prose writing strains towards poetry to express that.”

Rolle wrote: ‘Make my mind drunk on the boiling wine of your honeysounding sweetness’.

Dr Glover is completing a book about Richard Rolle. He is currently working at the University of Bergen.

Shrewsbury School, founded by Edward VI in 1552 by Royal Charter, regularly opens its Taylor Library for members of the public to enjoy its treasures. Darwin’s 'On the Origin of Species' is kept at the library alongside some of the earliest scientific and humanistic works collected by the School.

References

T. Glover, ‘The Original Text, Recipient, and Manuscript Presentation of Richard Rolle’s Emendatio vitae’, Mediaeval Studies (2025). DOI: 10.7202/1119489ar

Published 5th January 2026

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Credits

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_{Timothy Glover: Details of MS 25}
_{Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford: Richard Rolle}
_{University of Cambridge: Timothy Glover}