SOURCE: Dom David Knowles, "Richard Rolle," in The English Mystics, Burns Oates & Washboume Ltd., 1927, pp. 73-89.

In the following excerpt, Knowles depicts Rolle as a kind of early Romantic poet—one whose art is spontaneous, natural, personal, and almost rebelliously individualiste

The four writers who have now to be considered are very different in mental outlook one from another, and may to some degree be taken as the representatives in English medieval religious life of four distinct types of spirituality. Richard Rolle, the first, is a poet, almost a romanticist; a troubadour of GOD, spiritual brother of St Francis, throwing off conventional habits, and of an essentially simplifying, outgoing mind. However orthodox he may remain he is always and before all an individualist.

Rolle has had the good fortune to attract a series of able scholars both in this country and in Germany within the last half-century...