Authority and Exemplarity in Henry Suso and Richard Rolle

Summary

The works of two exemplary figures of fourteenth-century spirituality, Henry Suso and Richard Rolle, grant us insight into some of the most significant commonalities between the devotional cultures of fourteenth-century England and Germany. The reception history of the two authors demonstrates their skill in composing narratives and creating characters which subsequent generations of readers found compelling aides to their spiritual development and contemplative practices. The similarities between the two authors, while to a certain extent rooted in some of their common sources, nevertheless testify to the popularity of a particular type of self-fashioning as both author and eponymous character. Both this strategy of authorial self-presentation and the array of thematic commonalities they share can shape our understanding of the role their texts played in the process of transmission and translation of spiritual concepts between England and Germany in the later Middle Ages. Suso and Rolle, besides their many thematic and structural similarities, also had particular success in capturing the attention of readers and translators both religious and lay from the second half of the fourteenth century until the beginning of the seventeenth.

In particular, one of the central points of commonality between Suso and Rolle lies in what I term ‘devotional mobility’. By this I mean not only the instances of physical and spiritual mobility inherent in both (for instance, Rolle's account of wandering between insufficiently solitary hermitages and Suso's persecution while on trips to provincial chapters demonstrate the role of physical mobility in their self-descriptions; both explore the directional framework of spiritual ascent within the space of the visionary event as a type of spiritual mobility).