SOURCE: Conrad Pepler, "The Progress of Christian Life," in The English Religious Heritage, B. Herder Book Co., 1958, pp. 161-213.

In the excerpt below, Pepler places Rolle at the head of English mysticism. Reserving most of his attention for Rolle's English works, Pepler looks at Rolle's experiences and terminology in relation to broader conventions of medieval mysticism.

The New Light

Richard Rolle has been called 'The Father of English Mysticism' and it is to him we turn for the first introduction to mysticism in its strict sense among English writers. He was born some hundred years after the Ancren Riwle was written, and yet he is historically the first of the group of English mystics who experienced and wrote about the higher degrees of mystical prayer. Perhaps the greatest era of English sanctity had already passed when he was born in the last decade of the thirteenth century. There...