Versions and Manuscript Context
The three versions of Life of Soul appear each in a single manuscript: version L in the Bodleian Library (Oxford) manuscript Laud Misc. 210, folios 114r-132v; version A in the British Library (London) manuscript Arundel 286, folios 115r-129r; and version H in the Huntington Library (California) manuscript HM 502, folios 35r-60v. Version L is the most complete; version H has some material not in L, which may be original, or may represent expansions; and version A is a severely abridged version. The manuscripts in which all three appear are all orthodox compilations of devotional material, in L and H often material of lay interest. "L," for example, includes Book to a Mother, Rolle's Form of Living, the Sixteen Points of Charity, and The Abbey of the Holy Ghost, another tract that (as Gillespie says) "is intended for people seeking a 'relygyon of the herte'"; "H," Rolle again and St. Edmund's Mirror; and "A," the manuscript likely intended for a monastic audience, a commendation of virginity, several pseudo-Rolle works largely Anselmian or Victorine in origin, a tract on the ten commandments, and a set of contemplations on the liturgical hours. Aside from the differences of personnel and audience mentioned above, the three versions differ somewhat in the dialect of their English. The text's sole editor (Moon) locates versions L and H in the London area or points south, A farther north and west (and calls it perhaps a little more recent than the others). But the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English locates the scribal practices of both A and H in Warwickshire.
Life of Soul has been edited in full only once, by Helen M. Moon (aka Sister Mary Leonella, O.S.F., née Helen M. Pimpl): The Lyfe of Soule: An Edition with Commentary, ed. Sister Mary Leonella Pimpl, O.S.F. (Ph.D. Diss. Fordham University, 1963. DAI 25.4 (Oct. 1964): 2498-99. UMI 64-2408). This thesis was published (confusingly) as The Lyfe of Soule: An Edition with Commentary, ed. Helen M. Moon, Salzburg Studies in English Literature. Elizabethan & Renaissance Studies, 75 (Salzburg: Institut für englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1978).
An abridged transcript of the L version, together with a modern English translation by Paul Schaffner, appears in the anthology Cultures of Piety: Medieval English Devotional Literature in Translation, ed. Anne Clark Bartlett and Thomas H. Bestul (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999) pp. 118–140 (translation) and 217-231 (ME text). A full version of the same transcription (Middle English text only) is available online in the University of Michigan's Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.
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