Significatio and Senefiance, or Relics in Thomas Aquinas and Jean de Meun

This chapter asks whether Jean de Meun’s references in the Roman de la Rose to relics as a euphemism for genitals actually allude to a much larger debate in Paris between 1250 and 1280 about significatio in general, and about the religious and political significance of relics in particular, a debate in which Thomas Aquinas played an important role. Scholars have noted the influence of Ovid and Alain de Lille upon the Roman de la Rose, but have not tended to consider Jean de Meun’s scholastic sources, particularly his deployment of the theology of Thomas Aquinas.

The Romance of the Rose

The Romance of the Rose occupies a unique position in the medieval French literary tradition, widely recognized as the most circulated and well-known French narrative poem across Europe, from the late thirteenth to the early sixteenth century. This chapter attempts to situate the two parts of the romance, attributed to two authors, within the production of verse narrative in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By evoking the transition from orally-produced epic poetry to learned adaptations of Latin and Celtic narratives in the French vernacular, it attempts to articulate the profound impact of the Rose upon the establishment of the figure widely known as the clerkly narrator. The first author, Guillaume de Lorris, definitively developed the figure of the first-person narrator/lover figure, while the second, Jean de Meun, used the fictional ambiguity of dual authorship to create a paradigm of the deceptive narrator that will have a rich afterlife in late medieval literature.

“Faux Semblants: Antifraternalism Reconsidered in Jean de Meun and Chaucer,” Studies in Philology 101: 357-80

"Friar" characters in medieval French and English literature re-examined.