Medieval Discovery: Richard Rolle's Original Emending of Life Survives in One Copy - Medievalists.net

"The only complete surviving copy of Richard Rolle's original version of Emendatio vitae (The Emending of Life)-one of late medieval England's most widely read spiritual works-has been identified by Dr Timothy Glover. The finding suggests that every other surviving copy preserves an abridged form of the text produced by someone else, restoring Rolle's work in full and offering new evidence for how his writing first circulated."

"The manuscript is Shrewsbury School's "MS 25", a fourteenth-century copy long known to scholarship but, according to Glover, misunderstood-especially after a 2009 study concluded it was a text with added passages and that its dedication was forged. Glover's research challenges those conclusions, arguing that the Shrewsbury manuscript instead preserves the earliest and fullest form of Emendatio vitae now known to survive."

Shrewsbury School MS 25, a fourteenth-century manuscript, preserves the only complete surviving copy of Richard Rolle's original Emendatio vitae. The manuscript restores Rolle's full original draft and displays distinctive stylistic fingerprints and vocabulary, including the coined term "melliphono" ("sweet-sounding"). The identification implies that other extant copies transmit an abridged form produced by another hand. MS 25 overturns prior assessments that treated the copy as interpolated and its dedication as forged, indicating instead that it represents the earliest and most complete form now known. Rolle composed devotional works in Latin and English on prayer, contemplation, and divine love and enjoyed wide circulation in late medieval England.

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