Mediating the Immediate: Richard Rolle’s Mystical Experience in the Translations of his Self-Revelations

Abstract

This paper discusses how the fifteenth-century translators of Richard Rolle’s first-person accounts interpreted the mystic’s rapture. Rolle’s representations of the “immediate” occur in his Latin writings, but his English epistles also evoke such passages. The paper analyses the mystic’s idiosyncrasies with a focus on the idea of simultaneous presence and return. Then it investigates the ways in which the translators interfered in the vocabulary of heat and the sonority of Rolle’s experience. The translators “censored” both the melodic aspects of Rolle’s mysticism and his references to sighs. The paper concludes that the fifteenth-century translations of Rolle’s self-revelations intended to shape responses to mystical experiences by providing a more disciplined model of performing affects.