Ever since 1402 and the publication of the Querelle de la Rose begun by Christine de Pizan and Jean de Montreuil, the thirteenth century vernacular dream vision poem, the Roman de la Rose, has provoked rich and turbulent debate in print. De la Rose; Texte, image, fortune is both a continuation and a celebration of this tradition. The anthology presents a thoroughly engaging intertextuality among its twenty essays, reflecting the origins of several of the essays as papers presented at a conference on the Rose at the University of Antwerp. The other essays integrated into the collection contribute to the flow of ideas: it is one of a few anthologies to have a narrative arc, and I recommend reading the essays in the order of the table of contents: conversations continue from one essay to the next, with authors conducting debates both in the text and footnotes of the essays.
Compared with other Rose anthologies, [1] De la Rose seems to take a more physical, materialist approach to the poem, treating it more as an object to be manipulated in the mind (with the different interpretive models of the first section, "Lectures"), in space (with the image studies of the "Iconographie" section), and in time (with the study of legacies and appropriations of the poem in the section entitled "Postérité"). The anthology also includes a 383 entry annotated bibliography of Rose scholarship continuing the great work of Heather Arden's 1993 compendium, and a listing of almost two hundred Rose manuscripts, in collections ranging from Aberystwyth to Wormsley Manor, which have been very helpfully marked with references to those works in the annotated bibliography that discuss them. This codicological emphasis may be linked to the greater number of images discussed in this collection. If we are to treat this anthology as an indicator of the latest conversations about the Rose, these are decidedly more codicological, visual, and physical.
"Lectures" comprises five essays that exercise different interpretive models upon the poem. These models all emerge from tackling specific problems within the Rose, but offer strategies for understanding (or at least undertaking) the entire poem. The first two essays use Jean de Meun's authorial intentions as a starting point, while the last three apply extra-authorial perspectives to the poem.
Fittingly, this section begins with an article by Douglas Kelly whose scholarship has consistently emphasized the different ways of reading the Rose, and the presence of as many interpretations as there are readers of the Rose. In "Les visions du paradis chez Jean de Meun et Alain de Lille: contraires choses?" Kelly works closely with the famous verse "Ainsic va des contraires choses:/ Les unes sont des autres gloses" ("Thus things go in opposites,/ One is the gloss of the other," vv. 21573-74, Langlois edition), in order to compare articulations of paradise presented in the Rose through the lens of two of Jean de Meun's sources, Alain de Lille's De planctu Naturae and his Anticlaudianus. Reasons' Christian paradise, informed by moral and reasonable love, is contrasted to the God of Love's romantic paradise, striven for by the Lover's foolish love. Kelly explores a "principe des contraires choses" (8) ("a principle of opposites") which affects both the literary structures of the poem (in the opposition of the lofty allegory of paradise and the lowly realism of sex, for example) and its content (Genius's own confession, for instance, that "Les choses ici contenues,/ Ce sont trufles et fanfelues" ("The things contained here,/ Are trifles and trivia," vv. 20351-52) in the midst of his sermon about the two paradises). Eventually, this principle of opposites results in a progressive "rétrécissement du cadre morale" (17) (contraction of the moral framework) by Jean de Meun of Alain de Lille's own exploration of vices (in De planctu) and virtues (in Anticlaudianus). Kelly proposes a final twist in answering the question of his title, that even though Jean de Meun's morality is the opposite of Alain de Lille (all the while being inspired by it), the Rose poet ultimately has the same goal as that of his source: to better human morality, but through the satire of opposites that we see active in the Rose, rather than through the direct moral striving that informs De Planctu and Anticlaudianus. Brigitte Callay continues the exploration of Jean de Meun's moral codes by presenting "Jean de Meun's Romance and the Rose and the Polemic on the Theological Method: a Key to Meaning?". The Condemnations of 1277, which pitted an emerging, independent philosophy against a traditionalist theology at the University of Paris, create the historical backdrop to the important debate over the character of Nature, especially as she is first drawn by Alain de Lille's De Planctu Naturae, and as she is redrawn by Jean de Meun in the Rose. Where Nature imbues man with reason in De Planctu, she is a distant character from Reason in the Rose. Nature and Genius's "theological ratiocination" (39) should thus be viewed as ridiculous, because they are so far removed from Reason and her discourse of faith, but they can be used to reveal and understand Jean de Meun's project of satirizing a theology based on rationality rather than faith. Callay's thorough analysis of the Augustinian, Aristotelian and Averroist polemics surrounding the Condemnations of 1277 recasts Jean de Meun as promulgating a conservative ideology grounded in William of Saint-Amour's Augustinism. His Rose is thus a condemnation of a philosophy independent of theology.
The next three essays in the "Lectures" section remind us that meaning in the Rose is not beholden only to the author's intentions, but also to interpretive models presented by agents such as artists (Huot), mathematicians (Leupin) and architects (Kowalski). In "Women and 'Woman' in Bodley, Douce 332 (c. 1400): A Case of 'Accidental Meaning'?," Sylvia Huot confronts Alcuin Blamires and Gail C. Holian's provocative, and rather reductive, "Theory of Accidental Meaning," which attempts to deprive illuminators of the Rose of any interpretive capacity (citing literacy, codicological, economic, and market concerns). [2] Huot proposes to look beyond the artist's intention to the reader's reception of the artist's images and conducts an investigation of a medieval reader's experience of the poem as influenced by its images by positioning images as interpretive opportunities for the reader. In the case of MS. Douce 332, the images bring to light the manuscript's concern with women woven into the text through interpolations such as an adaptation of the poem "Le Bien des femmes" inserted into a speech by the God of Love. By choosing to illuminate some of La Vielle's more obscure metaphors for women (as caged birds, fol. 131v; or fish caught in a trap, fol. 132v), and providing unusual illustrations of Dido's and Lucretia's suicides, to cite a few examples, the illuminator draws the reader's attention to the condition of women--a resonant emphasis, Huot argues, for a manuscript made at the time of the Querelle. In a brilliant interpretive romp, Alexandre Leupin looks to the mathematical model of the Möbius strip to make sense of the Rose in "L'Hérésie littéraire. Paradigmes textuels dans le Roman de la Rose."[3] The Möbius strip's conjoined duality and endless continuity make it an apt interpretive model of the poem, and Leupin explores the full potential of this rich interpretive tool. With it, he is able to highlight linguistic continuities and resonances between Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's Roses (intentionality by either medieval author is not addressed, the priority of the article being to exercise the language and meaning of the poem along the lines of the Möbius strip); to weave Freudian and Lacanian theories of the unrepresentability of woman, the Lover, and "le rapport sexuel" (70) (sexual connection) into an investigation of what is in the empty center of the Rose's Möbius strip; and to use the Möbius strip's collapse of binaries (it has no beginning and no end, no front or back, no top or bottom) to explain the linguistic collapse within the tumult of metaphors, allegories, and words of the end of the Rose. Less convincing as an interpretive model, but equally interesting to think about initially, is Kowalski's contention in "Le Château de Jalousie: du rêve à la réalité," that Charles V was inspired by descriptions of towers in literature in the construction of Vincennes. The four manuscripts of the Rose, seven versions of the Roman d'Alexandre and seven copies of Roman de Troie in Charles's library all contained descriptions of central towers surrounded by groupings of smaller constructions--a centralized power structure, Kowalski argues, that the king would have desired as an image of his rulership. The argument would have been bolstered by a more in-depth architectural analysis of Vincennes itself, as well as a visual analysis of the four Rose manuscripts in question, but in its evocation of the power of literary and/or visual images to influence reader response, this essay is an ideal segue to the second section of the anthology.
The second section, entitled "Iconographie," is the most notable innovation of the anthology. The number of articles devoted to the visual study of Rose manuscripts is unprecedented and denotes a development in Rose scholarship towards the material, imagistic experience of the poem. This development is facilitated by the presence and on-going expansion of on-line access to manuscripts, such as those of various Rose manuscripts presented by Johns Hopkins University and the Pierpont Morgan Library (http://romandelarose.org) and Oxford University (http://www.image.ox.ac.uk), as well as the continuing illuminated Rose project of Meradith McMunn and the ground-breaking scholarship of art historians such as Alison Stones, Sandra Hindman, and Michael Camille who have done much in recent years to investigate secular imagery with links to vernacular text.
In "Iconographic relationships between the Roman de la Rose and Arthurian literature," Martine Meuwese signals the popularity of both the Roman de la Rose and the Lancelot en Prose (with 244 illuminated manuscripts and 290 illuminated manuscripts and fragment remaining, respectively) and inquires into "opportunities for cross- fertilization" (93) between the two iconographic traditions. Working through iconographic categories such as "The Lover Dreaming," and "Lovers and the Rose," the author argues for the appropriation of imagery from both the religious realm (the Lover Dreaming re-using Tree of Jesse imagery, the Rose being a symbol of the Virgin, for example) and within the emerging iconography of secular art (lovers in a tree within a Rose manuscript signaling Tristan and Isolde, for instance). Without an inquiry into illuminators' access to manuscripts (whether via workshops or the marketplace), the claims of the article remain at the formal, iconographic level, but provide a welcome look at the possible transmission of imagery within secular art. In "The Roman de la Rose manuscript in Dusseldorf," Gregor Weyer presents a careful analysis of a relatively undiscussed Rose manuscript that had been in a Nazi collection. The attribution of 22 of the 29 miniatures of the manuscript to Jeanne de Montbaston, who ran a prolific workshop in 14th-century Paris with her husband, makes it a fascinating case study in both manuscript production and iconography. A precise listing of which specific miniatures are by Jeanne and which are by the manuscript's other artist would have clarified questions of attribution that arise. The author loosely ascribes an innovative iconography of the vices (featuring a pair of men gesturing rhetorically to each other as they walk upon the scene of the allegorical vice) to the manuscript's other artist. Jeanne, meanwhile, undergoes a somewhat puzzling demotion in the course of the article, ultimately being dubbed an illuminator who painted awkwardly and misunderstood rubrics. Perhaps the author's upcoming work on the Montbastons will clarify the specificity of these attributions and characterizations.
Heidrun Ost presents a meticulous and dynamic analysis of iconographic influences in her article "The 'Mythographical Images' in the Roman de la Rose of Valencia (Biblioteca Histórica de la Universitat, Ms. 387)." Covering many issues from patronage to reception, Ost examines the luxury manuscript displaying 161 miniatures, which was made either for the Duke Burgundy or his brother, the Duke de Berry. The argument that the mythographical imagery of the c. 1405 manuscript may have been influenced by the textual descriptions of the gods in question presented in Petrus Berchorius's Ovid moralisé, composed around 1340, is sustained by a close analysis of images of several Ovid moralisé manuscripts. Thus, the complex iconographies of Saturn (his castration, the Golden Age and its end), that of Jupiter (his love for Ganymede, and his reign), as well as that of Neptune and Mercury are meticulously analyzed in comparison with both texts and images of the gods. The crisp images, two of them in lush color, enable the reader to follow this most convincing argument tracing the iconographic exchanges over the 27 mythographical miniatures of the Valencia Rose. "Du Roman de la Rose à La Dame à la Licorne: à propos de certains details iconographiques du manuscripts 387 de la B.U. de Valence," by Dulce Ma. González Doreste is somewhat of an anomaly within the collection. What begins as an analysis of the unique figure of a chained monkey in the Carole scene of Valencia, Ms. 387 becomes a re-interpretation of the iconography of the Cluny Unicorn Tapestries (whose dark and pixilated images make the argument difficult to follow), shedding little light on the operations of imagery within the Rose.
"Iconographie" ends with Lori Walter's masterful treatment of the Tournai Rose in "Marian Devotion in the Tournai Rose: from the Monastery to the Household." In many ways, this essay is emblematic of the best elements of the anthology: it communicates the many conversations that enter into any analysis of the Rose through both its rich footnotes and lucid text; it works very closely with a manuscript and argues for solid conclusions about the identity behind the nom de plume "Gui de Mori" (Guibert de Tournai) as well as the identity of the manuscripts' two illuminators (the Ghent Master and Pierart dou Tielt); in addition to issues of production, it addresses possibilities of reception for Gui's Rose moralisé within an aristocratic/high bourgeois context; and it performs an in- depth analysis of two images with many convincing comparative examples which broaden our understanding of both the author and illuminators of the Tournai Rose. The placement of a miniature of the Virgin and Child with donors atop a table of contents keyed to page numbers becomes significant in understanding the Tournai Rose as a Rose moralisé for its readers, perhaps especially its matronly reader in her preparations for the ethical education of her children. The opening miniature of the Rose text proper perpetuates the role of image as interpretive mode for text by representing both clerical (in the main image) and lay (in the bas-de-page) protagonists, arguing for the multi-valence of the Tournai Rose. Walters's meticulous argumentation and comprehensive documentation (amplified by three very helpful appendices) offer the reader an intimate and satisfying experience of this complex manuscript and the Rose's rich interpretive possibilities. As an essay delving into an early adaptation of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's text, it provides an engaging transition to the final section of the anthology.
"Posterité" explores the late medieval metamorphosis of the Rose in the didactic and ethical treatment of its commentators and provides multiple insights into the moral, philosophical, and political applications of the poem. The entire section is indebted to Sylvia Huot's inquiries into reception in adopting her model of close textual comparative analysis.[4] The critical mass of these ten essays, which so emphatically present "moralized" versions of the Rose, should reawaken debates about the original (if not "true") meaning of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's text: does the late medieval moralizing of the Rose signal a departure from the 13th-century poem's possibly ribald and satirical intentions that recent Rose scholarship has argued for, or is it a confirmation of a moralizing impulse present in the poem as of its invention? This last section invites the reader to enter the fray.
Luciano Rossi in, "De Jean Chopinel à Durante: la série Roman de la Rose--Fiore," offers many tantalizing suggestions about Jean de Meun's careers preceding authorship. Documents from the State Archives in Bologna listing a "magister Johannes de Mauduno" and his brother "Guillelmus," attest to the presence of Jean de Meun in Bologna as a law student from 1265-1269. This formation, and Jean de Meun's career as a canon, then archdeacon of Beauce at the cathedral of Notre-Dame d'Orléans from 1270-1303, leads Rossi to argue that Jean de Meun's section of the Rose is a moralizing satire of sexual and social mores akin to Alain de Lille's Anticlaudianus. Jean de Meun's literary self-consciousness (evident for Rossi in the word- plays possible around the name Jean de Chopinel) is manifested anew in the author of Il Fiore, here accepted as Dante. The blend of philosophy and poetry apparent in Il Fiore becomes a confirmation of Jean de Meun's own attempts to combine philosophy and poetry. In "Le remaniement de Gui de Mori et sa tradition manuscrite," Andrea Valentini provides a welcome listing of all complete and partial manuscripts of Gui de Mori's Rose. In complement to Lori Walter's socio-historical analysis of the Tournai Rose, this essay focuses on the codicological and linguistic manifestations of Gui de Mori's text. The manuscript tradition is small (twelve manuscripts altogether, and only the Tournai Rose is complete), and Valentini engages the complicated question of authenticity to Gui de Mori's text through analyses of rubrics and rhymes. A helpful appendix allows the reader to make his or her own textual comparisons. Peter De Wilde broadens the investigative scope to take on allegory and its effects on reading didactic texts in "Rencontres: le Pèlerinage de Vie humaine et le Roman de la Rose." Situating Guillaume de Digulleville's poem in the 14th century's emphasis on didacticism and "correct" ways of reading the Rose, the author focuses on the specifics of the link that Degulleville himself makes between the Roman de la Rose and his poem. Description is characterized as a tactic to slow down the reading of any plot in order to make allegorical consideration possible. This tactic, De Wilde argues, is one that Degulleville appropriates from Guillaume de Lorris, as well as the use of a spatial mnemotechnics, apparent in the description of the trees and birds of the Garden of Deduit. The interpretive frame of the Rose broadens from moralizing allegory to sexual politics in " 'Par l'amour estincelle se peut ly mondes reformer'. Le Roman de la Rose revu par Eustache Deschamps" by Virginie Minet-Mahy. Using the Miroir de Mariage and several Lais by Eustache Deschamps, Minet-Mahy argues that Deschamps' political use of courtly love is a strategy he appropriates from Jean de Meun and explores specific examples of the political metaphorization of marriage (the nation being married to the king), as well as the transposition of the laments of courtly love to those of society (the lover does not weep for his beloved, but for the ills of the world). The author is careful to not say that Jean de Meun had the same didactic goals as Deschamps, but rather that he was employing a strategy that Jean de Meun used: to reconfigure the language of courtly love into that of social commentary. Deschamps thus writes didactic "mirror of princes" texts whose literary appeal (in using the language and myths of courtly love (Narcissus, Pygmalion, Hermaphroditus, and Actaeon are mentioned) stems from Jean de Meun.
The next three articles are dedicated to Jean Molinet's late 15th- century prose translation of the Roman de la Rose. In "Le Roman de la Rose comme voie de paradis. Transposition, parodie et moralization de Guillaume de Lorris à Jean Molinet," Fabienne Pomel inserts Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meun, Guillaume Degulleville, and Jean Molinet into a tradition of the "Way to Paradise" poem type, the earliest example, the Songe d'Enfer by Raoul de Houdenc, reaching back to 1215-1225. Guillaume de Lorris's Rose would itself, then, be a laicization of the type; Jean de Meun's an expansion and satire of Guillaume de Lorris's text; Guillaume Degulleville's a first moralization; and Jean Molinet's an expansion of the moralizing impulse by being a soteriological consideration. Jean de Meun's interpretation of the Way to Paradise, with its satirical expansion of the theme, stands in contrast to Degulleville and Molinet's moralizations which are here presented as a return to Guillaume de Lorris (and perhaps even Raoul de Houdenc's) moral roots. The author leaves room to think that Guillaume de Lorris and Raoul de Houdenc themselves may have been somewhat ironic, rendering any "orthodoxy" of the Rose or the Way to Paradise interestingly problematic. In "Tradition textuelle et techniques de réécriture: le Roman de la Rose moralisé et Jean Molinet," Jean Devaux presents an extensive framework within which to understand Molinet's endeavor to "reduire le Romant de la Rose de rhetorique en prose" (to reduce the Romance of the Rose from rhetoric to prose) (379), including the Burgundian court of Philippe de Clèves, and the greater culture of moralization which had developed around the Rose by around 1500. Devaux's concerns are primarily linguistic, and his meticulous analysis of Molinet's syntactical strategies for "unrhyming" Jean de Meun's text is a fascinating inside look at the verbal deconstruction and reconstruction that Molinet performs. The reconstruction is far reaching: in the center of his work, Molinet likens the Roman de la Rose to the Bible, reconfiguring Guillaume de Lorris as Moses and Jean de Meun as John the Evangelist. Jacqueline Thibault Schaefer continues Devaux's linguistic pursuits with "Jean Molinet rhétoriqueur et le recyclage du Roman de la Rose." Here, the emphasis is on the self- consciousness of language as much as language itself: Molinet's interest in rewriting the Rose may have been as much an interest in form (what language can do as it moves from poetry to prose) as it was in content (the moralization of the Rose). Thibault Schaefer conducts her analysis on the micro-level as well and puns, alliterations, poetic forms, and rhymes create a rich closer look at Molinet's text.
The last three articles of De la Rose delve into the Rose's reception in the early and mid-15th century as well as the 19th and 20th. In "Le Duc des Vrais Amans? Christine de Pizan ré- écrit le Roman de la Rose," Heather Arden revisits Christine de Pizan's continuing project of rewriting the Rose by asking about the suffering of Christine's heroines in texts such as the Cent ballades d'amant et de dame, the Dit de la pastoure and especially the Livre du duc des vrais amans. If Christine sought to undo the harm of the Rose by rewriting it, why not write it with a triumphant, instead of suffering, female protagonist? The answer is a subtle analysis of Christine's "ventriloquism" (414) as it interacts with the process of love delineated in the Rose. She does not seek to erase the Rose, but rather to reconfigure it: to use the same elements of desire, courtship and suffering and to expand upon the woman's experience within this process. La Dame de la Tour and her letter to the young woman lover are the site of this expansion, and Arden argues for the emergence of a new womanly wisdom in the mist of courtly suffering. In "Malebouche dans le Roman de la Rose et le Champion des Dames," Leslie C. Brooke presents a close analysis of one character, Malebouche, in a little-known Rose appropriation, Le Champion des Dames (c. 1441-42), and the changes that its author, Martin le Franc, wrought upon the character. The changes are two fold: where Malebouche spoke and acted a great deal in the Rose, in the Champion he is almost silent and more of a mover of other characters than an actor himself. He is also friends with Faux Semblant, a surprising twist since Faux Semblant, along with Constrained Abstinence, killed him gruesomely in the Rose. The author argues that these changes render Malebouche more of a symbolic character than a real agent, and offers an interesting contrast to the late 15th-century appropriations of the Rose previously examined in this anthology, which engaged in a more didactic and moralizing tone. Even towards the end of the collection, there are interpretive surprises and one sees the ever-expanding potential of the Rose if a secondary character such as Malebouche can thusly continue to inspire. The final essay asks us to consider the reception of the Rose from the late-19th century to about 1960. In "La Réception du Roman de la Rose dans les manuels et les anthologies du XIXe et XXe siècles," Yvan G. Lepage isolates six reasons why the Rose was under-appreciated in the history of literature, as it was conceived in the 19th century: a reliance on classicism, making Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's medievalism seem awkward and unwieldy; a lack of appreciation of allegory; the linguistic gulf between medieval and modern French; a classical understanding of the "esprit français" in literature, which the Rose authors did not fit; the categories of literary canons that did not apply to the Rose; and the absence of an affordable edition/translation in modern French. Strubel's 1965 edition and translation turned the tide and Lepage allows the copious bibliography at the end of the anthology to speak to the appreciation and expansion of Rose scholarship since the 1960s. Though many of the 19th- and early 20th-century prejudices against the Rose have been overturned, some modern characterizations still remain, such as the configuration of Guillaume de Lorris as courtly and lyrical and Jean de Meun as bourgeois and chaotic. Lepage does not necessarily seek to argue that these different prejudices and characterizations are right or wrong, but rather strives to isolate the modernist principles that rendered the Rose a maligned work for a period of time. This essay completes the narrative arc of the anthology begun by Douglas Kelly's investigation of intertextuality within the Rose.
The discursive nature of this anthology makes it a very engaging read. The assumed knowledge of the Rose text, and the absence of translations of either Latin or French position it in the realm of the graduate student and scholar, where it should enrich the multiple sides of Rose debates. The scholarly apparatus of a thorough bibliography and an appendix of existing manuscripts provides a welcome practical framework for further study of the Rose. The rich end-matter of the anthology is where the presence of the editors is perceived. Otherwise, they maintain a light touch, presenting the essays with the most minimal of introductions. They leave the intertextual work of the anthology to the Rose and its critics, and the reader is left to resolve the many complex issues explored here for him or herself. In this challenge, De la Rose perpetuates the activation of readership promoted by the medieval Rose. De la Rose exists in inviting continuity with Christine McWebb's recent publication, which provides a translation of critical texts about the Rose predating and including Christine de Pisan's Querelle.[5] It will also thrive in correspondence with the Johns Hopkins/Pierpont Morgan Library Rose website mentioned above, soon to be significantly expanded with holdings from the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Through innovation and collegiality, modern scholarship is finding new digital and textual ways to keep the Rose, as aptly stated in this anthology's preface, "une oeuvre toujours recommencée" (a perpetually re-launched work) (viii).
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Notes:
1. Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot, eds., Rethinking the Roman de la Rose: Text, Image, Reception (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); and Etudes sur le Roman de la Rose, Collection Unichamp, 4 (Paris, 1984).
2. The "Theory of Accidental Meaning" is presented in their 2002 publication, The Romance of the Rose Illuminated: Manuscripts at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002).
3. A Möbius strip is made by taking a strip of paper, twisting it and then joining the ends of it to create a continuous circle with a twist that enables you to trace a line without interruption. (A thorough visual explanation can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVsIAa2XNKc).
4. Sylvia Huot, The Romance of the Rose and its Medieval Readers: Interpretation, Reception, Manuscript Transmission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
5. Christine McWebb, Debating the Roman de la Rose; A critical anthology (London: Routledge, 2007).