Still more striking is the role the author applies to manipulation and duplicity. Speech
serves two purposes: to instruct and to trick. All people can be divided into knaves and
fools, masters and slaves, deceivers and deceived. The deceivers create illusion by hiding
behind masks; it is not easy for the Lover, Fair Welcome, or anyone else to distinguish
appearance from reality, the mask from the flesh, the literal bark from an allegorical
kernel. The author tells us that, since the end of the Golden Age, dissimulation, violence,
and evil are part of the human condition and that we must learn to cope with them.
Throughout the Rose, he implicitly urges the Lover and the audience to go beyond
appearances and seek the truth, to open our eyes and rip aside the mask of falsehood.
Knowledge can then lead to action. Some of Jean’s characters remain passive, blind,
impotent. Others, including the Lover, attain a measure of freedom, becoming masters
not slaves, adults not children.
Jean’s is a world of comedy. Several of his characters embody comic archetypes
derived from the classics of ancient Rome. They are rigid, mechanical, obsessed with
their narrow concerns. Furthermore, the narrative line, such as it is, constitutes the
triumph of young love over old constraint. In spite of the blocking figures, Venus’s torch
burns and the story ends, as comedies must, with the couple packed off to bed. Whatever
Jean’s doctrine, whether for good or ill, the victory of our animal nature is achieved in a
denouement of erotic explosion and the exaltation of life. It is for this reason that many
scholars, especially in France, associate Jean de Meun with the awakening of humanism,
the rebirth of reverence for antiquity, lust for life, and the revaluation of art that are
hallmarks of the 12th- and 13th-century renaissance.
William C.Calin
[See also: COURTLY LOVE; GUILLAUME DE LORRIS; ROSE, ROMAN DE LA;
QUARREL OF THE ROMAN DE LA ROSE]
Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. Le roman de la Rose, ed. and trans. Armand Strubel. Paris:
Livre de Poche, 1992.
——. Le roman de la Rose, ed. Félix Lecoy. 3 vols. Paris: Champion, 1965–70.
——. The Romance of the Rose, trans. Charles Dahlberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1971.
Arden, Heather M. The Romance of the Rose. Boston: Twayne, 1987.
——. The Roman de la Rose: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1993.
Badel, Pierre-Yves. Le roman de la Rose au XIVe siècle: étude de la réception de l’œuvre. Geneva:
Droz, 1980.
Brownlee, Kevin, and Sylvia Huot. Rethinking the Romance of the Rose: Text, Image, Reception.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992.
Calin, William. A Muse for Heroes: Nine Centuries of the Epic in France. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1983, chap. 5.
Fleming, John V. The Roman de la Rose: A Study in Allegory and Iconography. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1969.
Gunn, Alan M.F. The Mirror of Love: A Reinterpretation of the Romance of the Rose. Lubbock:
Texas Tech Press, 1952.
Payen, Jean-Charles. La Rose et l’utopie: révolution sexuelle et communisme nostalgique chez Jean
de Meung. Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1976.
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 932