Sub Rosa

Contemplatio01

Incendium Amoris (The Fire of Love)

Incendium Amoris

Rolle's major Latin mystical autobiography and treatise, written before 1343, describes his own experience of three supernatural gifts — calor (a physical warmth in the chest), dulcor (ineffable sweetness), and canor (heavenly music heard by the soul) — and explains the four purgative stages toward union with God. It survives in 44 Latin manuscripts plus one contemporary Middle English translation, and Margery Kempe had a priest read it aloud to her alongside other devotional works. While Rolle addressed his vernacular works specifically to noble and gentlewoman patrons, the Incendium circulated widely in clerical and monastic libraries attached to noble households; its extraordinary manuscript survival — across 44 Latin copies and a Middle English version — marks it as the most internationally circulated product of 14th-century English mysticism, reaching Carthusian houses on the Continent as well as English court circles.

before 1343Latin·Plantagenet · English nobilityLikely

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Oratio02

The Form of Living

Forme of Lyvyng

Richard Rolle (c. 1290–1349), the Yorkshire hermit whose works survive in more English manuscript copies than any other medieval writer — over 650 manuscripts — composed The Form of Living in his final months as a personal spiritual guide addressed by name to Margaret Kirkby, a nun who had left Hampole to become an anchoress in East Layton, Richmondshire. It survives in thirty manuscripts, and its patronage link to the landed nobility is directly documented: Margaret Kirkby's patrons as an anchoress were the Fitzhugh family of Richmondshire, a prominent Yorkshire noble family. In twelve chapters Rolle moves from the basics of Christian living through meditation and prayer to the three signature mystical gifts he describes in the Incendium Amoris — calor (heat), dulcor (sweetness), and canor (heavenly music) — making this the most accessible vernacular entry-point to his experiential mysticism. As the first vernacular guide for recluses in England since the Ancrene Wisse, it was widely read by devout laywomen and noblewomen seeking formation in the contemplative life throughout the late 14th and 15th centuries.

c. 1348–1349Middle English·Plantagenet · English nobilityConfirmed

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