The Yorkshireman Richard Rolle (c. 1300-1349) was the first and most immediately influential of the English medieval mystics. His passionate insistence on a personal communion between Creator and created affected the development of pre-Reformation religious thought, and his decision to write in English rekindled in the modern idiom the tradition of vernacular devotional prose. This is the first full critical edition of Rolle's major writings, leaving out only his glossed Psalter. Although the manuscript chosen is not in the original Northern dialect, it is of sufficient authority to restore...