The Latin Translation of Richard Rolle’s Form of Living in Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 140/80: Edition and Study

Form of Living is one of the major works of the earliest of the Middle English mystics, the Yorkshire hermit Richard Rolle (d. 1349), and one clear sign of its success is its translation from English into Latin. This essay presents the first edition of the full(ish) Latin translation of Form, preserved uniquely in Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 140/80, noting the translator’s additions to the text and demonstrating that he worked from a Middle English exemplar most closely resembling what is now Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1524, part 6. This full translation should be distinguished from a second attempt to translate Form into Latin, attested in a fragmentary state in London, British Library, MS Harley 106.