Ego Dormio is an English-language letter by Richard Rolle thought to date from the 1340s, advising an anonymous woman on how best to love God and gain salvation by proceeding through the "three degrees of love" to arrive at the third and highest, a "contemplative life".
The text has no name in its manuscripts, so is known by modern scholars by its first two words, which themselves are part of a quotation from the Vulgate Bible translation of the Song of Songs 5.2: "Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat" ("I sleep but my heart is awake"). The bulk of the letter is in prose, but its description of each of the three degrees of love is followed by a poem.
Scholars have debated whether the recipient was a nun or whether she was a layperson considering becoming one, though the manuscript Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, Dd. 5. 64 says that the letter was written for a nun belonging to Yedingham Priory in Yorkshire.
The work survives in twelve manuscripts (one of which contains two copies), and in a Latin translation in the fifteenth-century manuscript Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS. 140/80, folios 115vâÂÂ118v. As listed by Dennis Lynch and Margaret G. Amassian, and by Isabel De La Cruz Cabanillas, these are:
Although De La Cruz Cabanillas found the content of most manuscripts very similar overall, Lynch and Amassian noted that manuscripts vary extensively in the detail of their wording. They present the following line of verse (which, as it appears in Dd v 64, means "the thorn crowns the King; that pricking is very sore") as an example:
Lynch and Amassian concluded that the manuscript closest to Rolle's lost archetype is Cambridge University Library, MS Dd. 5. 64 (and that the Latin translation in Gonville and Caius College, MS. 140/80 is also a primary witness to Rolle's earliest English text), while De La Cruz Cabanillas noted both MS Dd. 5. 64's consistency with Yorkshire English and the fact that the manuscripts seem to come from Yorkshire and the Midlands, with few or no southern examples.