Rethinking The Romance Of The Rose

The Romance of the Rose has been a controversial text since it was written in the thirteenth century. There is evidence for radically different readings as as early as the first half of the fourteenth century. The text provided inspiration for both courtly and didactic poets. Some read it as a celebration of human love; others as an erudite philosophical work; still others as a satirical representation of social and sexual follies. On one hand it was praised as an edifying treatise, on the other condemned as lascivious and misogynistic. Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot and the contributors to this volume—Pierre-Yves Badel, Emmanuele Baumgartner, John V. Fleming, Robert Pogue Harrison, David F. Hult, Stephen G. Nichols, Lee Patterson, Daniel Poirion, Karl D. Uitti, Dieuwke E. van der Poel, and Lori Walters—represent all the major areas of current work on the Romance of the Rose, both in American and in Europe. The volume will be of value to students and scholars of medieval literature, intellectual history, and art history.

The Romance of the Rose had a transformative effect on the multilingual literary culture of fourteenth-century England, leaving more material evidence for late medieval English-speaking readers than any other vernacular literary work from mainland Europe. This book examines its decisive effect on English literature of the fourteenth century, and new literary experiments it provoked from writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, William Langland, and the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Linking the English afterlife of the Rose to a host of ongoing cultural developments in mainland Europe, The Romance of the Rose and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature reveals the deep interconnectedness of English and European literary culture. Examining courtly, clerical, and classicising orientations towards the text, it presents new arguments for the place of the Rose at the centre of fourteenth-century English literature, and explores its rich manuscript history to reveal new evidence about the cultural significance of this love allegory from thirteenth-century France. The chapters avoid an author-centred approach, arranging readings of the Rose and its relation with English literature in constellations that reveal complex unfolding inter-relation of the diverse readings of the Rose that took place in fourteenth-century England.

Around the year 1400, the poet Christine de Pizan initiated a public debate in France over the literary "truth" and merit of the Roman of the Rose, perhaps the most renowned work of the French Middle Ages. She argued against what she considered to be misrepresentations of female virtue and vice in the Rose. Her bold objections aroused the support and opposition of some of the period’s most famous intellectuals, notable Jean Gerson, whose sermons on the subject are important literary documents. "The Quarrel of the Rose" is the name given by modern scholars to the collection of these and other documents, including both poetry and letters, that offer a vivid account of this important controversy. As the first dual-language version of the "Quarrel" documents, this volume will be of great interest to medievalists and an ideal addition to the Routledge Medieval Texts series. Along with translations of the actual debate epistles, the volume includes several relevant passages from the Romance of the Rose, as well as a chronology of events and ample biography of source materials.

Arguably the single most influential literary work of the European Middle Ages, the Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun has traditionally posed a number of difficulties to modern critics, who have viewed its many interruptions and philosophical discussions as signs of a lack of formal organization and a characteristically medieval predilection for encyclopedic summation. In Fortune's Faces, Daniel Heller-Roazen calls into question these assessments, offering a new and compelling interpretation of the romance as a carefully constructed and far-reaching exploration of the place of fortune, chance, and contingency in literary writing. Situating the Romance of the Rose at the intersection of medieval literature and philosophy, Heller-Roazen shows how the thirteenth-century work invokes and radicalizes two classical and medieval traditions of reflection on language and contingency: that of the Provençal, French, and Italian love poets, who sought to compose their "verses of pure nothing"in a language Dante defined as "without grammar," and that of Aristotle's discussion of "future contingents" as it was received and refined in the logic, physics, theology, and epistemology of Boethius, Abelard, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas.Through a close analysis of the poetic text and a detailed reconstruction of the logical and metaphysical concept of contingency, Fortune's Faces charts the transformations that literary structures (such as subjectivity, autobiography, prosopopoeia, allegory, and self-reference) undergo in a work that defines itself as radically contingent. Considered in its full poetic and philosophical dimensions, the Romance of the Rose thus acquires an altogether new significance in the history of literature: it appears as a work that incessantly explores its own capacity to be other than it is.

Argues that the 13th-century French poem can best be understood not by trying to resolve or choosing among the diverse meanings within it or among the myriad of interpretations by scholars and medieval and modern readers, but to accept those differences and reflect on our own willingness to accept to reject those meanings as a guide for a love or morality. Paper edition (unseen), $17.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The first truly in-depth, interdisciplinary study of philosophical questions in the seminal medieval literary work, the Roman de la Rose.

Conservative thinkers of the early Middle Ages conceived of sensual gratification as a demonic snare contrived to debase the higher faculties of humanity, and they identified pagan writing as one of the primary conduits of decadence. Two aspects of the pagan legacy were treated with particular distrust: fiction, conceived as a devious contrivance that falsified God’s order; and rhetorical opulence, viewed as a vain extravagance. Writing that offered these dangerous allurements came to be known as “hermaphroditic” and, by the later Middle Ages, to be equated with homosexuality. At the margins of these developments, however, some authors began to validate fiction as a medium for truth and a source of legitimate enjoyment, while others began to explore and defend the pleasures of opulent rhetoric. Here David Rollo examines two such texts—Alain de Lille’s De planctu Naturae and Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose—arguing that their authors, in acknowledging the liberating potential of their irregular written orientations, brought about a nuanced reappraisal of homosexuality. Rollo concludes with a consideration of the influence of the latter on Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale.