Richard Rolle and his followers have left considerable information about his life, including autobiographical comments in Rolle's Latin and English writings and the Officium de Sancto Ricardo, compiled by hagiographers in the 1380s in anticipation of a never-realized canonization. The lessons and antiphons of the officium tell of Rolle's birth at Thornton in Yorkshire, his years as a student at Oxford, and his flight from that city and from sin at age nineteen. Considerable attention is then given to his encounter with his sister and his request for two of her garments--one gray and one white--to make a tunic before his next flight to the life of a hermit. As he runs in this makeshift habit, covered with his father's rain hood, his sister gives him his first unsympathetic reading: "Frater meus insanit. Frater meus insanit" (My brother is mad. My brother is mad). Subsequent responses through the...