Lifting the Veil: Sexual/Textual Nakedness in the Roman de la Rose

Abstract

In his Anticlaudianus and De planctu naturae, Alan of Lille put integumental theory into literary practice. This chapter examines Alan's De planctu naturae and Jean de Meun's portion of the Roman de la Rose in terms of style. Alan's ornate and richly artificial modus loquendi, with its dazzling rhetoric, convoluted allegory, and heavy dependence on classical myth and grammatical metaphors, distances the reader from empirical reality and temporalia. Jean de Meun, however, sought to tell tales out of school (to some extent at least), a plain-style poet whose main modes of procedure are narration and exemplification rather than enigmatic fable and allegory. The language of the Rose is frequently outspoken, explicit, literal. At one point in the poem, de Meun quite unmistakably uses the language of integumental hermeneutics.