Overview

The Melos amoris stands as the most daring literary achievement of medieval England's most influential mystic, Richard Rolle. Full of autobiographical glimpses and spiritual rhapsodies, this sustained etude in alliterative, rhythmic Latin prose contains Rolle's first public account of his profoundly sensory mystical experience. As Rolle defends himself against controversy, he offers detailed descriptions of the spiritual fire, sweetness, and song that characterize his mysticism, amid a labyrinthine weave of scriptural exegesis, personal narrative, and inspired utterance. Among his longest and most literary works, the Melos amoris has long been derogated as a frivolous gaud of the hermit's youth. Read more generously, it offers a key to the corpus of Rolle's Latin writings and opens crucial insight into his mystical discipline and the spiritual practices and experiences that stemmed from that discipline in the later Middle Ages. Richard Rolle's Melody of Love offers manifold pathways into the Melos amoris and its world, along with the first full translation of this unstudied masterpiece into English, in alliterative prose that mirrors the original. A quintet of appendices offers an edition of a spurious chapter, marginalia and music found in one key manuscript, reconstructions of early fourteenth-century Anglo-Latin songs and recitations, and guidance through Rolle's unusual Latin vocabulary. These materials are supported by a companion website offering audio recordings by Sine Nomine, the early music ensemble-in-residence at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, and a range of additional contextual matter. Conceived with student and scholar alike in mind, this multidisciplinary, multimedia project holds rewards for researchers not only of medieval literature, but also of medieval music, embodiment, theology, popular spirituality, and cultural history.

Full Product Details

9780888442123

Table of Contents

Reviews

Sonorous, intimate, adoring, self-congratulatory, and profuse, jubilantly playing on the edge of chaos without ever quite toppling in, Richard Rolle's Melos amoris is one of the most astonishing works of prose to survive from medieval England, making strange the ways of Christian devotion with all the abandon and passion for singularity that enthrall modern readers of The Book of Margery Kempe. Now at last, after centuries of puzzlement and neglect, it finds a worthy interpreter in Andrew Albin. His wonderful -- and wondering -- translation does not render Rolle's weird masterpiece so much as performs it, ushering us into an unfamiliar but strikingly personal world of sound, colour, gesture, and shifting register with unflagging energy and a confident ear. Reading and teaching the medieval English religious tradition will never be quite the same again. ?-- Nicholas Watson, Harvard University

Author Information

Andrew Albin is Assistant Professor of English and Medieval Studies at Fordham University. His scholarship in the field of historical sound studies examines embodied listening practices, sound's meaningful contexts, and the lived aural experiences of historical hearers -- in a word, the sonorous past -- as an object of critical inquiry. His work has been recognized with grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Medieval Academy of America, the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available