Meun’s transformation of the woman-rose into a piece
of lifeless architecture, a sanctuary, which the Lover
pries open with his pilgrim’s staff.
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 fl esh, the literal bark from an allegori-
cal 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. Oth-
ers, 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 fi gures, 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.
See also Abélard, Peter; Boccaccio, Giovanni;
Chaucer, Geoffrey; Dante Alighieri;
Guillaume de Lorris
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 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 I’œuvre. Geneva: Droz, 1980.
Brownlee, Kevin, and Sylvia Huot. Rethinking the Romance of
the Rose: Tex t, 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.
William C. CalinJEANNE D’ARC (ca. 1412–1431)
The most heroic of France’s saints, Jeanne d’Arc was
born to a peasant family in Lorraine. At thirteen, Jeanne
began hearing the “voices” (of SS. Michael, Catherine,
and Margaret) that inspired her. In February 1429, she
persuaded a Valois captain to provide an escort for
her dangerous journey to the court of Charles VII. At
Chinon, Jeanne convinced the king of her divine mis-
sion to defeat the English and to assist at his overdue
coronation. After formal inquiry into her orthodoxy
and chastity, she was given a commanding role in a
relief force for Orléans and led reinforcements into
the besieged city on April 29. She inspired counterat-
tacks that compelled the English to abandon the siege
on May 8. A month later, her army’s decisive victory
at Patay ensured Valois control over the Loire Valley
and destroyed the myth of English invincibility. The
subsequent campaign that brought Charles to Reims for
a triumphant coronation on July 17 was the high point
of Jeanne’s meteoric career.
Now a political force, Jeanne became a recognized
leader of the court faction favoring renewed war over
negotiations with the Anglo-Burgundians. Failure in war
soon destroyed her infl uence. When, she was defeated
and wounded in an ill-considered assault on Paris in
September, Charles arranged a truce and disbanded his
army. Though her family had been ennobled, Jeanne
was politically isolated and left the court in the spring
to bolster Compiègne’s resistance to a Burgundian
siege. She was captured there on May 24, 1430, and, to
his eternal discredit, abandoned by Charles. Jeanne’s
cross-dressing, claims to divine guidance, and success
had aroused suspicions of sorcery, but her subsequent
trial and execution for heresy were acts intended pri-
marily to discredit the Valois cause. In response to an
accusation by representatives of the University of Paris,
her Burgundian captors delivered her for trial at Rouen
under the direction of Bishop Pierre Cauchon. Eloquent
in testimony and steadfast when threatened with torture,
Jeanne submitted only when weakened by illness and
faced with execution. Sentenced to a life of imprison-
ment and penance, she relapsed and was condemned.
Courageous to the end, she insisted on her innocence
and asked the executioner to hold the cross high soJEAN DE MEUN