SOURCE: Rosemary Woolf, "The Lyrics of Richard Rolle and the Mystical School," in The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1968, pp. 159-79.

In the excerpt that follows, Woolf considers Rolle in relation to the broader conventions and schools of mystical writing, focusing particularly on the tradition of the Passion meditation. Ultimately contradicting the pervasive image of Rolle as a "natural" writer, Woolf notes his innovative skill with literary form and places him at the beginning of "devotional-mystical writing in English."

All the poetry so far discussed is unmystical. It may vary in the degree of literary formality, but the emotion expressed in it has no affinities with the fervour and elevation of the mystics; in kind it is the emotion familiar to every man and woman. Even in such works as Þe Wohunge of oure Laverd, which was probably intended for the...