THE OLDEST MANUSCRIPT OF RICHARD ROLLE'S WRITINGS

Although he is the most widely read English author of the later Middle Ages, the early transmission of Richard Rolle's writings remains particularly obscure. Fragmentary evidence implies that the English writings appeared very early, perhaps within a decade of the author's death, and that they drew in their train the more extensive and often very widely disseminated Latin writings by some point in the 1380s. But an overlooked fragment from Rolle's most demanding work, Melos amoris, four binding leaves in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 647, offers evidence for at least a modest Latin circulation in the 1350s or 1360s. The essay presents and describes these heretofore unnoticed materials and explores their implications for the early Yorkshire circulation of Melos.