Speculum Vitae ('Mirror of Life') is an anonymous Middle English poem, written in the third quarter of the fourteenth century.
The poem consists of a commentary on the Lord's Prayer primarily derived from a prose Old French work, the Somme le roi of Laurent d'Orléans, dated 1279.
[1] Ralph Hanna, the modern editor of Speculum Vitae, dates it to "broadly the third quarter of the fourteenth century", on the basis that it contains a versification of material from Richard Rolle's Form of Living (lines 5595–834) and so must postdate that work's initial circulation in 1348 or 1349 at the earliest, and that the poem must pre-date its earliest surviving manuscript copy, that in British Library, MS Additional 33995, which was produced around 1375.
[5] Some measure of the poem's initial success can be grasped from the substantial number of forty-five surviving manuscript copies, in a geographically dispersed variety of scribal dialects, suggesting widespread circulation.
No Latyn wil I speke no waste, But Englisch, that men vse mast, That can ech man vnderstonde, That is born in Ingelande.