Roman de la Rose

This chapter intends to outline, in a succinct yet critical manner, the essential elements allowing us to establish a link between Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose and the works of Dante, from the contested Fiore and Detto d’amore to the Commedia. Rather than seeking to provide an exhaustive picture, given the abundant critical literature available, this chapter addresses the following questions: 1) what is the Rose? 2) What did it represent to the generation of Tuscan poets from the second half of the 13th century, Cavalcanti and the young Dante, in particular? 3) What was its role in Dantean writing, especially in its complex poetics, politics, and organization of knowledge?

The Afterlife of the Roman de la rose

Mobility in learned circles was a reality in the Europe of the Middle Ages, and it is only when we consider the reception of well-known works, such as the thirteenth-century Roman de la rose, in the countries where they circulated in the local language that we are able to gain a more complete understanding of their impact on literary and cultural currents even after the authors had passed away. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s conjoined Roman de la rose (1236, 1269-78) is without a doubt one of the foundational works of French medieval literature with over 360 extant manuscripts. Focusing on two non-French adaptations of this work that appeared within a century of the date of its composition, I show that these translations, or more accurately rewritings, enabled its survival and contributed to its sustained popularity in medieval Europe. The adaptations that are the subject of this analysis are Il Fiore, a thirteenth-century translation and adaptation into Italian often attributed to Dante, and the Romaunt of the Rose, commonly attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer. I conclude that through the medieval practice of interpretatio, the authors of the Fiore, and the Romaunt of the Rose adapt the original text to reflect their own contemporary cultural realities.

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.