Le Roman de la Rose (English: The Romance of the Rose) is a medieval French poem styled as an allegorical dream vision. It is a notable instance of courtly literature. The work's stated purpose is to both entertain and to teach others about the art of romantic love. Throughout the poem, Rose is used both as the name of the titular lady and as a symbol of female sexuality. The other characters' names also function both as regular names and as abstractions illustrating the various factors that are involved in a love affair.
The poem was written in two stages. The first 4,058 lines, written by Guillaume de Lorris circa 1230, describe the attempts of a courtier to woo his beloved. This part of the story is set in a walled garden (a locus amoenus), a traditional literary topos in epic and chivalric literature. Around 1275, Jean de Meun composed an additional 17,724 lines. In this enormous coda, allegorical personages (Reason, Genius, and so on) hold forth on love.
Video Roman de la Rose
Reception
Early
The work was both popular and controversial. It was one of the most widely read works in France for three centuries, and it was possibly the most read book in Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries. Its emphasis on sensual language and imagery provoked attacks by Jean Gerson, Christine de Pizan and many other writers and moralists of the 14th and 15th centuries. Historian Johan Huizinga writes: "It is astonishing that the Church, which so rigorously repressed the slightest deviations from dogma of a speculative character, suffered the teaching of this breviary of the aristocracy (for the Roman de la Rose was nothing else) to be disseminated with impunity."
Modern
Later reactions suggested that it had a tenuous encyclopedic quality. The nineteenth-century scholar and writer Gaston Paris wrote that it was "an encyclopedia in disorder" and British author C. S. Lewis described it as having an "encyclopedic character". One historian wrote that while Roman de la Rose is obviously not an encyclopedia, "it evokes one, represents one, dreams one, perhaps, with all its aspirations and limitations".
Maps Roman de la Rose
Manuscripts and incunabula
About 300 manuscripts are extant, one of the highest figures for a secular work. Many of these are illustrated, most with fewer than ten remaining illustrations, but there are a number with twenty or more illustrations, and the exceptional Burgundian British Library Harley MS 4425 has 92 large and high quality miniatures, despite a date around 1500; the text was copied by hand from a printed edition. These are by the artist known as the Master of the Prayer Books of around 1500, commissioned by Count Engelbert II of Nassau. The peak period of production was the 14th century, but manuscript versions continued to be produced until the advent of printing, and indeed afterwards - there are at least seven manuscripts dated after 1500. There are also seven incunabula printed editions before 1500, the first from Geneva in about 1481, followed by two from Lyons in the 1480s and four from Paris in the 1490s. An edition from Lyons in 1503 is illustrated with 140 woodcuts. Digital images of more than 140 of these manuscripts are available for study in the Roman de la Rose Digital Library.
Translation and influence
Part of the story was translated from its original Old French into Middle English as The Romaunt of the Rose, which had a great influence on English literature. Chaucer was familiar with the original French text, and a portion of the Middle English translation is thought to be his work. Critics suggest that the character of "La Vieille" acted as source material for Chaucer's Wife of Bath. There were several other early translations into languages including Middle Dutch (Heinrik van Aken, c. 1280). Il Fiore is a "reduction" of the poem into 232 Italian sonnets by a "ser Durante", sometimes thought to have been Dante, although this is generally thought unlikely. Dante never mentions the Roman, but is often said to have been highly conscious of it in his own work. In 1900, the pre-Raphaelite F. S. Ellis translated the whole of the poem into English verse. C. S. Lewis's 1936 study The Allegory of Love renewed interest in the poem.
Gallery
Editions
- Langlois, Ernest, ed. Le Roman de la Rose par Guillaume de Lorris et Jean de Meun. 5 vols. Société des Anciens Textes Français. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1914-24.
- Lecoy, Félix, ed. Le Roman de la Rose par Guillaume de Lorris et Jean de Meun. 3 vols. Classiques français du Moyen Âge. Paris: Champion, 1965-70.
- Strubel, Armand, ed., trans, and annot. Le Roman de la Rose. Lettres gothiques, 4533. Paris: Librairie Générale Française - Livre de Poche, 1992. ISBN 2-253-06079-8
English translations
- Robbins, Harry W., trans. The Romance of the Rose. New York: Dutton, 1962.
- Dahlberg, Charles, trans. The Romance of the Rose. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971. ISBN 0-691-06197-1
- Horgan, Frances, trans. and annot. The Romance of the Rose. Oxford World's Classics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. ISBN 0-19-283948-9
See also
- Ars Amatoria - the 'art of love'
Notes
Further reading
- Arden, Heather M. The Roman de la Rose: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1993. ISBN 0-8240-5799-6
- Gunn, Alan M. F. The Mirror of Love: A Reinterpretation of "The Romance of the Rose". Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech P, 1951.
- Huot, Sylvia. The Romance of the Rose and Its Medieval Readers: Interpretation, Reception, Manuscript Transmission. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. ISBN 0-521-41713-9
- Kelly, Douglas. Internal Difference and Meanings in the Roman de la rose. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1995. ISBN 0-299-14780-0
- McWebb, Christine, ed. Debating the Roman de la Rose: A Critical Anthology. Routledge Medieval Texts. New York: Routledge, 2007. ISBN 978-0-415-96765-5
- Minnis, Alastair. Magister Amoris: The Roman de la Rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. ISBN 0-19-818754-8
External links
- Full text from Project Gutenberg: Vol. 1, Vol. 2
- Roman de la Rose Digital Library at Johns Hopkins University
- 12 Ms on Digital Scriptorium
- Roman de la rose at Somni
- Editions from the Library of Congress
- Le Rommant de la Rose [Lyons, Guillaume Le Roy, ca. 1487]
- Cest le Romant de la Rose. [Lyon, Imprime par G. Balsarin, 1503]
- "Roman de la Rose". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911.
Source of article : Wikipedia
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