Richard Rolle, Postille super novem lectiones motuorum: Glosses on the Nine Lessons of the Dead, ed. and trans. Andrew Kraebel. British Writers of the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, 9. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2025, clivi, 259 pp.

Richard Rolle (ca. 1300–1349) was perhaps the most prolific writer of English poetry and prose during the half-century before Geoffrey Chaucer (1340–1400). However, much of his writing was in medieval Latin, and most of that focused on devotional texts and the spiritual life. As a teenager from Yorkshire, he traveled to Oxford and perhaps to Paris in order to study religion. However, he felt called to become a hermit rather than a churchman or scholar, and he spent the remainder of his life in solitude – first in a forest, then on the properties of several patrons, and finally in a convent, where his devoted student, the anchorite Margaret Kirkby (ca. 1430–ca. 1490) later collected his writings and gathered accounts of miracles he was said to have performed.