The Roman De La Rose In Its Philosophical Context

Examines the complex thirteenth-century poem Roman de la rose in the light of the philosophical ideas of its time and shows the range and scope of the poem's dialogue with pressing philosophical questions at the time it was written.

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

The Roman de la rose in its Philosophical Context offers a new interpretation of the long and complex medieval allegorical poem written by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun in the thirteenth century, a work that became one of the most influential works of vernacular literature in the European Middle Ages. The scope and sophistication of the poem's content, especially in Jean's continuation, has long been acknowledged, but this is the first book-length study to offer an in-depth analysis of how the Rose draws on, and engages with, medieval philosophy, in particular with the Aristotelianism that dominated universities in the thirteenth century. It considers the limitations and possibilities of approaching ideas through the medium of poetic fiction, whose lies paradoxically promise truth and whose ambiguities and self-contradiction make it hard to discern its positions. This indeterminacy allows poetry to investigate the world and the self in ways not available to texts produced in the Scholastic context of universities, especially those of the University of Paris, whose philosophical controversies in the 1270s form the backdrop against which the poem is analysed. At the heart of the Rose are the three ideas of art, nature, and ethics, which cluster around its central subject: love. While the book offers larger claims about the Rose's philosophical agenda, different chapters consider the specifics of how it draws on, and responds to, Roman poetry, twelfth-century Neoplatonism, and thirteenth-century Aristotelianism in broaching questions about desire, epistemology, human nature, the imagination, primitivism, the philosophy of art, and the ethics of money.

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. -- Sarah-Grace Heller

One of the most influential texts of its time, the Romance of the Rose offers readers a window into the world view of the late Middle Ages in Europe, including notions of moral philosophy and courtly love. Yet the Rose also explores topics that remain relevant to readers today, such as gender, desire, and the power of speech. Students, however, can find the work challenging because of its dual authorship by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, its structure as an allegorical dream vision, and its encyclopedic length and scope. The essays in this volume offer strategies for teaching the poem with confidence and enjoyment. Part 1, "Materials," suggests helpful background resources. Part 2, "Approaches," presents contexts, critical approaches, and strategies for teaching the work and its classical and medieval sources, illustrations, and adaptations as well as the intellectual debates that surrounded it.

Cutting-edge and fresh new outlooks on medieval literature, emphasising the vibrancy of the field.

In Medieval Allegory as Epistemology, Marco Nievergelt argues that late medieval dream-poetry was able to use the tools of allegorical fiction to explore a set of complex philosophical questions regarding the nature of human knowledge. The focus is on three of the most widely read and influential poems of the later Middle Ages: Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose; the Pélerinages trilogy of Guillaume de Deguileville; and William Langland's vision of Piers Plowman in its various versions. All three poets grapple with a collection of shared, closely related epistemological problems that emerged in Western Europe during the thirteenth century, in the wake of the reception of the complete body of Aristotle's works on logic and the natural sciences. This study therefore not only examines the intertextual and literary-historical relations linking the work of the three poets, but takes their shared interest in cognition and epistemology as a starting point to assess their wider cultural and intellectual significance in the context of broader developments in late medieval philosophy of mind, knowledge, and language. Vernacular literature more broadly played an extremely important role in lending an enlarged cultural resonance to philosophical ideas developed by scholastic thinkers, but it is also shown that allegorical narrative could prompt philosophical speculation on its own terms, deliberately interrogating the dominance and authority of scholastic discourses and institutions by using first-person fictional narrative as a tool for intellectual speculation.

Between Orders and Heresy foregrounds the dynamic, creative, and diverse late medieval religious landscapes that flourished within the spaces of social and ecclesiastical structures. This collection reconsiders the arguments put forward in Herbert Grundmann’s monumental book, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages, and challenges his traditional interpretive binary, recognized as the shared origins of many medieval religious movements. The contributors explore the social relationships fostered between secular clergy members, including parish priests, local canons, and aristocratic confessors, and examine the ways in which laypeople inspired and engaged in devotion beyond religious orders. Each essay in the volume considers a major theme in medieval religious history, such as the implementation of apostolic ideals, pastoral relationships, crusade connections, vernacular traditions, and reform. Organized to historicize and challenge the deeply embedded historiographical tendencies that have long distorted the complex dynamics of the late medieval world, Between Orders and Heresy is a major assessment of medieval religious belief and activity beyond and between the binary of orders and heresies