the Roman de la Rose, an allegorical narrative begun
by Guillaume de Lorris. This masterwork has survived
in over 250 manuscripts. It also had twenty-one printed
editions from 1481 to 1538. The Rose was translated
partially or in toto during the medieval period once
into Dutch, twice into Italian, and three times into
English—the fi rst English fragment is attributed to
Chaucer. Jean de Meun infl uenced Dante, Boccaccio,
Machaut, and Froissart; he played a crucial role in the
formation of both Chaucer and Gower. Jean’s section
of the Rose became the subject of the fi rst great literary
quarrel, at the beginning of the 15th century. Jean de
Meun was the fi rst recognized auctor and auctoritas
in French literary history, and his book the fi rst true
French classic, glossed, explicated, quoted, indexed,
anthologized, and fought over—treated as if it were a
masterpiece from antiquity.
Guillaume de Lorris wrote his Roman de la Rose,
4,028 lines left unfi nished, in the early 1220s. In the
decade 1264–74 Jean de Meun brought Guillaume’s
text to a conclusion. Jean’s Rose, some 17,722 lines,
does not merely complete the earlier poem: he grafts a
totally original sequel onto it.
The God of Love comes with his army to succor
Guillaume’s forlorn Lover. First, False Seeming and
Constrained Abstinence slay Foul Mouth, permitting
the Lover to speak with Fair Welcome. A pitched battle
occurs between the attackers and the defenders of the
castle, ending in a truce. Finally, Venus leads a victorious
assault, fl inging her torch into the sanctuary: the castle
bursts into fl ames, and the Lover wins the Rose.
The action and the allegory no longer play a primary
role, as they did for Guillaume de Lorris. They serve
as supports, and pretexts, for discourse: exhortations
from Reason and Friend to the Lover, False Seeming’s
confession of his true nature to the God of Love before
he is admitted into the army, the Old Woman’s exhorta-
tion to Fair Welcome, Nature’s confession to her priest,
Genius, and Genius’s exhortation to the army before
the fi nal battle.
The God of Love refers to Jean’s book as a miroër
aus amoreus (1. 10,621). It is, in one sense, a specu-
lum or anatomy, a medieval encyclopedia, treating all
knowledge, including ethics, economics, cosmology,
astronomy, optics, alchemy, and the university. The
knowledge in the speculum, however, is granted unity
and coherence by means of its inclusion under the cat-
egory of love, which Jean expounds in all facets, both
good (sex and reproduction, friendship, justice, the love
of reason, one’s neighbor, and God) and bad (lust for
money, enslavement to Fortune, clerical celibacy, and
the hypocrisy and deceit that exist between false lovers
and false friends).
That the Roman de la Rose is didactic no one de-
nies, but the precise nature of the message, the world
vision that Jean de Meun wishes to instill, is subject to
controversy. Most scholars believe that Jean transforms
and refutes Guillaume de Lorris’s Rose, that he derides,
undermines, and destroys the ideal of fi n’amors at every
turn. One school of thought argues that Jean counters
fi n’amors with a call to procreation, to free love in the
service of cosmic plenitude. Another school proposes
that Jean treats all his characters, with the exception of
Lady Reason, with irony and that his philosophy con-
forms to orthodox, Augustinian Christianity. The reason
scholarly opinion differs so strikingly, why it is so dif-
fi cult to pin down the author’s personal doctrine, lies in
the fact that Jean de Meun has chosen to exploit a unique
version of narrative technique, quite different from that
of his predecessors. Jean distinguishes himself as author
from the dreamer-protagonist of his story, proclaimed
to be Guillaume de Lorris, thus creating a fi rst level of
irony and distance. Second, the dreamer-protagonist,
Fair Welcome, and Genius listen to and approve or
disapprove of the lengthy discourses listed above, all
of which are also presented with comedy and irony.
Speakers have a proclivity to contradict themselves,
and to cite texts from antiquity that refute rather than
support their position. There is no foolproof method
for determining which, if any, of the discourses are to
be given greater weight than the others; which, if any,
carry Jean’s own conviction. Readers must judge each
of these delegated voices in turn, analyzing the facts and
rhetoric, to come to their own conclusions. The result,
perhaps intended by Jean de Meun, is a state of doctrinal
indeterminacy, in which the Lover and the audience are
offered a sequence of philosophies and worldviews. The
Lover, in the end, decides—he opens the sanctuary with
joy—but the reader-audience is not obliged to applaud
his decision. The indeterminacy remains, part and parcel
of Jean’s text and of a certain late Gothic mentality of
which he is the fi rst outstanding master.
Less controversial are the texture and ambience of
Jean’s imaginative world, a domain in which he is as
great an innovator as in narrative technique. Compared
with Guillaume de Lorris, Jean is a master of truculent
vulgar speech, material detail, and picaresque natural-
ism. He shifts the audience’s perspective from top to
bottom, from rose petals to what they hide. A generation
before Dante, three generations before Chaucer, Jean
juxtaposes lofty and humble registers of style. Scenes,
images, and speech once reserved to the fabliaux or
excluded from polite letters altogether are now included
in a serious work of art, alongside the sublime.
Jean’s demystification of courtly love assumes
several forms. His characters underscore the role of
money in the erotic life, that so often the opposite sex
is an object to be purchased, bartered, or exchanged for
money or other commodities. The process of reifi cation,
and perhaps of antifeminism, is crowned by Jean deJEAN DE MEUN