a beautiful, elite society and a new form of love that
transcends ordinary morality? Or is it a society obsessed
with its own youth and the pleasures of self-gratifi cation,
careful to exclude images of Old Age and Poverty from
the inner precincts of its own self-interest? Is this a love
beyond Reason’s comprehension, or is it the self-delu-
sion of youth calling something amor that is really folie?
Is this the meaning of the Fountain of Narcissus for the
Lover? Is it really a dangerous fountain that might lead
ultimately to death, or are the crystals a gateway to a
higher form of love?
Because the poem breaks off with no hint of how it
will end, or even how near the end the reader is, schol-
ars have often turned to jean de Meun’s continuation
and other texts for help in interpreting Guillaume’s
formidable roman. It is a poem shrouded in mystery
and tantalizingly inconclusive.
See also Jean de Meun, Macrobius
Further Reading
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: Cham-
pion, 1965–70.
——. The Romance of the Rose, trans. Charles Dahlberg. Princ-
eton: Princeton University Press, 1971.
Arden, Heather. The Romance of the Rose. Boston: Twayne,
1987.
——. The Roman de la Rose: An Annotated Bibliography. New
York: Garland, 1993.
Batany, Jean. Approches du “Roman de la Rose.” Paris: Bordas,
1974.
Brownlee, Kevin, and Sylvia Huot. Rethinking the “Romance of
the Rose”: Text, Image, Reception. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1992.
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.
Lewis, C.S. The Allegory of Love. London: Oxford University
Press, 1936.
Muscatine, Charles. “The Emergence of Psychological Allegory
in Old French Romance,” PMLA 68 (1953): 1160–82.
Poirion, Daniel. Le roman de la Rose. Paris: Hatier, 1973.
Robertson, D.W. A Preface to Chaucer. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1962.
Spearing, Anthony. Medieval Dream-Poetry. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1976.
Emanuel J. Mickel
GUINIZZELLI, GUIDO (c. 1230–1276)
The Bolognese poet and jurist Guido Guinizzelli is the
fi rst great poetic fi gure associated with the dolce stil
nuovo. Although he was once thought to have been from
the de’ Principi family, his family was most likely the
Magnani. His grandfather, Magnano, was a prosecutor
for the Bolognese commune; his father, Guinizello di
Magnano, was appointed to the council of the people and
served as a judge and later as podestà at Narni. Guido
Guinizzelli was evidently the eldest of six children.
He married Beatrice della Fratta in 1272, and their son
Guiduccio was born the following year. Guinizzelli
led an active professional and political life. He was a
member of the Ghibelline Lambertazzi party and was
banished, with his brothers Giacomo and Uberto and his
son Guiduccio, by the victorious Guelf Geremei party
in 1274. He chose Monselice near Padua as his place
of exile and died there.
Guinizzelli’s poetry comprises five canzoni and
fi fteen sonnets confi dently ascribed to him, two frag-
mentary poems, and four canzoni whose authenticity
is disputed. Most of the authentic poems appear in one
or more of three great early (late thirteenth- or early
fourteenth-century) manuscript anthologies of Italian
lyric poetry. Two of these anthologies are in Florence:
Rediano 9 (Laurentian Library) and Banco Rari 217
(Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale). The third is in the Vati-
can Library (Latino 3793) and in later collections—for
example, Chigi L.VIII.305 (Vatican Library) and the
Raccolta Bartoliniana (Accademia della Crusca, Flor-
ence). Each poem has a separate, often complex, textual
history, and no reliable chronology can be established.
Guinizzelli’s verse techniques are generally conserva-
tive, and his language incorporates forms from Sicilian,
Provençal, Tuscan, Latin, and French sources. All the
poems aim at musical effects, but they vary greatly in
style. The opening sententia and moralizing tone of the
canzone Tegno di folle ‘mpres’, a lo ver dire (“I think a
man foolish, to tell the truth”) echo contemporary Tus-
can poets, especially Guittone d’Arezzo. The themes,
diction, and syntactic complexity of Madonna, il fi no
amor ched eo vo porto (“My lady, the perfect love I offer
you”) recall the tradition of Sicilian-Provençal poetry.
Sonnets like Pur a pensar mi par gran meraviglia (“It
seems a great wonder to me merely to think”) and Fra
l’altre pene maggio credo sia (“Among all evils I believe
the worst”) are examples of didactic lyrics in the middle
style, whose subject matter Dante (De vulgari eloquen-
tia, 2.2.6–10) identifi es as virtue. Volvol te levi, vecchia
rabbiosa (“May a whirlwind strike you, you vicious old
woman”) is lively, satiric, and vituperative.
The poems associated with the dolce stil nuovo
represent a quarter of Guinizzelli’s extant verse, but
on the strength of them Guinizzelli has been regarded
variously as a founder or precursor of the changes that
occurred in Florentine poetry between 1280 and 1310.
His most infl uential piece is the canzone Al cor gentil
rempaira sempre amore (“Love returns always to a noble
heart”), which announces two important concepts—the
coexistence of love and the noble heart and the fi gure
of the donna angelicata (angelic beloved). The fi rstGUILLAUME DE LORRIS