Jean De Meun Research Articles

Botanical symbolism in the Hypnerotomachia: botanical signifiers of a humanist handling of interior transformation

This article focuses on the botanical specimens and their symbolic purpose in the narrative of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499). It examines the questions as to why certain plants are positioned at certain narrative stages, and how the relationship between their aesthetic, medical, literary, and symbolic purpose fits with the narrative. It also examines how this ratiocination of reflecting a developing topography with the interior development of the soul is handled in a wholly humanist–Renaissance manner over earlier treatments of botany in the medieval philosophical dream allegories such as Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la rose and Brunetto Latini’s Il Tesoretto, or the pre-medieval Prudentius’s Psychomachia. 1

Understanding Deschamps's Ballade Praising Chaucer in the Context of Early Humanist Epistolary Exchanges in Verse and Prose

Abstract: Eustache Deschamps's famous ballade praising Chaucer as "great translator" is best understood in the context of the early French humanist milieu whose literary values, linguistic markers, and transcultural reach it displays. With this epistolary ballade, written in the late 1390s and avant-garde at the time, Deschamps wanted to establish a literary friendship and an exchange of poetic writings with Chaucer, whom Deschamps perceived as a fellow humanist poet-translator, and whom he lauded for translating eloquence into the English language. Evidence for this new interpretation comes from comparisons of Deschamps's Ballade 285 with early fifteenth-century epistolary exchanges in French verse and prose, including letters from the debate over Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose and the exchange of poetic praise between Deschamps and Christine de Pizan; from the Latin epistolary exchanges of the last quarter of the fourteenth century between leading French and Italian humanists Jean de Montreuil and Coluccio Salutati; and also from Petrarch's Latin letters to long-dead classical authors, which permitted no reply. Although Ballade 285 survives only in the collection of 300 "moral ballades" at the beginning of the huge manuscript of his collected works in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Fr. 840, Deschamps must have valued it, for this is the only section whose content he is thought to have selected and ordered himself before his death in 1404.

Zur Subversion des höfischen Liebesdiskurses: Christine de PizansCent Ballades d’amant et de dame(1409–1410) zwischen Erotik, Misogynie und marienhafter Selbstinszenierung

AbstractThis contribution analyses the tension betweenimitatioandrenovatioin Christine de Pizan’sCent Ballades d’amant et de dame(1409–1410). It aims to show that Pizan intertwines traditional courtly discourse with fragments of Jean de Meun’s and Ovid’s writings, in order to denounce the courtly topos of worship of the lady as a manipulative strategy of seduction. In this way, she emphasizes the misogynistic conditions of the sublimated muteness and passivity of women in courtly discourse and engages in meta-reflections on her own role as a writer in the cultural context of theQuerelle des femmesand on the historical decline of France during the reign of Charles VI.

Contest, Translation, and the Chaucerian Text

Contest, Translation, and the Chaucerian Text

Geoffrey Chaucer in Context. The Oxford Handbook of ChaucerThe Oxford Handbook of Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer in Context. The Oxford Handbook of ChaucerThe Oxford Handbook of Chaucer

Romance of the Rose (Excerpt)

Romance of the Rose (Excerpt)

The Afterlife of the Roman de la rose

Mobility in learned circles was a reality in the Europe of the Middle Ages, and it is only when we consider the reception of well-known works, such as the thirteenth-century Roman de la rose, in the countries where they circulated in the local language that we are able to gain a more complete understanding of their impact on literary and cultural currents even after the authors had passed away. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s conjoined Roman de la rose (1236, 1269-78) is without a doubt one of the foundational works of French medieval literature with over 360 extant manuscripts. Focusing on two non-French adaptations of this work that appeared within a century of the date of its composition, I show that these translations, or more accurately rewritings, enabled its survival and contributed to its sustained popularity in medieval Europe. The adaptations that are the subject of this analysis are Il Fiore, a thirteenth-century translation and adaptation into Italian often attributed to Dante, and the Romaunt of the Rose, commonly attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer. I conclude that through the medieval practice of interpretatio, the authors of the Fiore, and the Romaunt of the Rose adapt the original text to reflect their own contemporary cultural realities.

From Socially Distant to Socially Engaged: Exploring the Soundscape and Material Environment of Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune

Ostensibly a story about gaining confidence in love, Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune has been explored as a summa of contemporary musical styles and a treatise on the memorial arts. It has also been examined as an important example of the use of citation and allusion in the fourteenth century because it incorporates references to Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy and Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s Le roman de la Rose. This essay enhances these studies by focusing on a particular aspect of the narrative: the use of soundscape and material environment to express the protagonist’s emotional growth. After exploring key concepts such as soundscape, authorial self-presentation, and melancholy, it considers how sound is introduced and presented in relation to the narrator’s emotional world and how music is woven through the narrative. An analysis of how sound and touch play a role in the narrator’s interaction with Lady Hope leads to a discussion of the use of soundscape and material environment in the description of the Park of Hesdin and the festivities at the manor house. As this examination of soundscape and environment will show, Machaut chooses to use them as a means to convey the narrator’s burgeoning confidence: he gives a minimal and cliched description of the wonderful park when the narrator is mired in melancholy yet offers an elaborate, exciting treatment of the manor house after the narrator’s confidence-building interaction with Lady Hope. The essay closes with a consideration of how the presentation of sound and material environment relates to Machaut’s use of Boethius. In the context of the material turn within medieval studies, I argue that we can view sound and objects within medieval literature as media for the communication of ideas about narrative and character development and that this form of analysis sits comfortably with other lenses of interpretation.

Time and the Reader of the Roman de la Rose

ABSTRACT This article argues for reading the Roman de la Rose according to an asynchronous model of narrative time. In particular, this article shows that the Roman de la Rose explicitly thematizes and inscribes its reader within a non-linear praxis of reading that has consequences for how meaning is forged within vernacular verse narrative. It begins by establishing a view of narrative time, and the reader’s affective experience of time, according to an Augustinian model that allows for asynchronous experience to pass through a present moment of reading. The article then outlines the temporal orientations of Guillaume de Lorris’s and Jean de Meun’s poems, which it views as presenting distinct modes of reading the Roman de la Rose according to the dual functions of anticipation and memory.

Tractatus de ludo scachorum

Tractatus de ludo scachorum

Medieval Narratives of Alexander the Great: Transnational Texts in England and France by Venetia Bridges

MLR, .,   Griffiths’s essay on Chaucer’s e House of Fame examines the function of different kinds of memory and their effectiveness in poetic creation, and sees the poem as a representation of the poet’s own mind and thought processes. Julia Bourke analyses meditations, emotional responses, and memory training induced by hand mnemonics (illustrated) and the meditative texts of Anselm, Aelred of Rievaulx, and Stephen of Sawley. Gustave Zamore traces the evolving use of synderesis in Bonaventura’s writings, from a moral-psychological sense that allows one to perceive right from wrong to a more mystical one which culminates in the mind’s union with God, and considers Saint Francis’s stigmata to be a supreme example of union through the suffering of Christ. Petrarch’s fictional ascent of Mount Ventoux is constantly beset by errant thoughts, representing his attachment to human desire and impeding his soul’s spiritual ascent towards God. Francesca Southerden analyses this and compares it with canzone  of his Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. Philip Knox interprets Jean de Meun’s Rose as a kind of thought experiment developing to its comic limits Boethius’s philosophical notion of the natural desire for the good. Examining three different fabliaux, Gabrielle Lyons shows how the genre provides the opportunity to explore freely the exegetical methods normally used in biblical exegesis and suggests a range of interpretations of the moral lessons she finds in each poem. Examining the relationship between Alan de Lille’s De planctu Naturae and Ipomedon, Daniel Reeve sees the convoluted French poem as a response to the philosophical Latin text, and as a quest for pleasure rather than truth. Finally, Vincent Gillespie looks at medieval poetic theory and the differing effects on the individual of rhetoric, which works by persuasion, and poetry, which relies on imagination. Overall these densely argued essays present a stimulating review of the variety of thought experiments to be found in the Middle Ages. U  B L C. B Medieval Narratives of Alexander the Great: Transnational Texts in England and France. By V B. Woodbridge: Brewer. . xi+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. is welcome monograph brings together two difficult subjects and uses each to understand the other in productive ways. e literary, historical, and textual traditions of the iconic Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great are ferociously vast and complex, branching out from antiquity onwards and intersecting across Asia, Europe, and parts of Africa. Even offering a more local account, as Venetia Bridges does, of French, English, and Latin romance texts circulating in the medieval context of France and England is a challenge. In answering that challenge she gives a clear and authoritative picture of this branch of the Alexander tradition, situating it in relation to other key literary texts composed in France and England . Opposing national-linguistic anachronisms, the aim is to take a ‘more truly historicist’ approach (p. ) to the medieval literature of France and especially to that of England. is is a timely approach that chimes with the current scholarly  Reviews focus on understanding texts, stories, and knowledge as phenomena moving across borders and that should be seen as European or global just as much as local. Bridges uses the context of ‘networks’ to understand the movement of texts and people and uses the term ‘transnational’ as a way into thinking about the relation between what might be called the ‘local’ and the ‘global’. e book does not lose itself in the long grass of theoretical considerations, though, but stays rooted in the history and study of specific texts. It offers readers a clear and most usable guide through the Alexander tradition as it particularly evolves in the British context, and the first chapter is particularly important in this regard: it clearly sets out the different textual traditions that feed into the Alexander literature composed in the twelh century and should be read by anyone working on this material as received in a francophone or Insular context. It contrasts in method with the more expansive four-volume work recently brought out by Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas (La Fascination pour Alexandre le Grand dans les littératures européennes (Xe–XVIe si...

Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma: Riddles, Rhetoric, and Theology

Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma: Riddles, Rhetoric, and Theology

Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy. Kellie Robertson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Pp. ix+443.

<i>Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy</i>. Kellie Robertson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Pp. ix+443.

Les Écoles de pensée du xiie siècle et la littérature romane (oc et oïl). Études réunies par Valérie Fasseur et Jean-René Valette.

There are clearly many potential benefits to studying literary history alongside intellectual history, and attempts to persuade researchers from these different fields to cross disciplinary boundaries to engage in dialogue are to be welcomed, for all the difficulties in doing so. This collection comes out of an interdisciplinary conference that had the aim of exploring the relationship between the explosion of literary production in the vernacular in France and the ‘schools of thought’ that characterize intellectual histories of the twelfth century, most famously the Neoplatonic thought of the schools of Saint-Victor and Chartres. Valérie Fasseur and Jean-René Valette’s brief Introduction acknowledges the difficulties of their interdisciplinary approach, noting that many of the contributions do not so much answer the question at stake as interrogate the terms of reference: What is a ‘school of thought’? How can its influence be shown? Some of the collection’s essays give useful overviews to broader questions, charting the foothills of the issue if not quite scaling the peaks, such as Fasseur’s interesting discussion of Occitan literature’s possible intellectual debts to twelfth-century schools of thought or Valette’s survey of criticism about Grail literature. Dominique Boutet catalogues instances where twelfth- and thirteenth-century French literature discusses the creation of the world and suggests a potential link to Chartrian Neoplatonism. Strangely, several essays are included that, as they openly acknowledge, do not engage with the volume’s problematic, such as Jacques Verger’s chapter on Bernard of Clairvaux and secular audiences, Jean-Yves Tilliette’s interesting discussion of Victorine literary style, Jean-Marie Fritz’s comparison of clerical literary production at the court of Marie de Champagne, or Dominique Poirel’s presentation of secular values in Hugh of Saint-Victor’s writing. Articles on allegorical poetry in the final third of the volume are somewhat disappointing. Damien Boquet usefully suggests a link between Jean de Meun’s Roman de la rose and Aelred of Rievaux’s De spirituali amicitia but does not explain how this might affect interpretation of the poem. Marie-Pascale Halary picks up Guillaume de Lorris’s games with mystical traditions in his part of the Rose but strangely neglects the poet’s ludic irony to offer an unproven hypothesis, namely that Guillaume is influenced by Cistercian thought. It is difficult to know what to do with Armand Strubel’s article on vernacular allegory, which does not engage with twelfth-century thought and which has only six references to secondary literature. Ultimately, this collection provokes a serious and valuable question: how should medieval texts be studied in an interdisciplinary way? The approach here, tending towards inclusivity and choosing to juxtapose articles that stay within their own disciplines, cannot be said to be an unqualified success and one can only wish that much of the good work in the volume had been brought together in a more focused way to answer the interesting questions raised.

Introduction: The Roman de la Rose and Christine de Pizan in the Digital Age

This issue of Digital Philology celebrates the merger of two digital repositories of medieval manuscripts, one devoted to the Roman de la Rose , the other, to the early fifteenth-century author and bookmaker, Christine de Pizan (1365–c.1430). The three essays in Part I illustrate how debates initiated in the original text of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun are carried on in several fourteenth-and fifteenth-century Rose manuscripts. The two essays in Part II study how digital technology enriches our understanding of Christine's masterpiece, her Queen's Manuscript, London, British Library, MS Harley 4431, and her Livre des fais d'armes et de chevalerie .

Codex as Critic: One Manuscript's Dialogue with the Romance of the Rose

Few manuscripts explore Jean de Meun's philosophical anthropology—particularly its engagement with women and sexuality—as directly as does a mid-fourteenth-century miscellany preserved in the Bibliotheque municipale of Dijon, MS 525. Compiled by a scribe named Mathias du Rivau between 1355 and 1362, the miscellany includes a series of texts that either influenced Jean's Rose , or were influenced by it. Satiric and moral in nature, these texts form a counterpoint to the Rose that riffs on Jean's concept of dialectical opposites— contraires choses —particularly in the closing sections (as suggested by Mathias's marginal annotations). Key to the critical dynamic of the miscellany is a group of four texts—identified as prosa mulierum —immediately following the end of the Rose . Scholars who have studied this manuscript have dismissed these texts as misogynistic or even (anachronistically) anti-feminist. Such readings ignore the dialectical context of Dijon 525. Above all, they ignore the nuanced way that the prosa mulierum engage the disparate panoply of Jean de Meun's perspectives on the subject.

Lady Nature in Word and Image in Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose

Despite the encyclopedic nature of Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose , there are two topics that have been accorded a central place in the quagmire of debates, discussions, and digressions that make up the second Rose . They are the successful and guaranteed regeneration of the human species and the proper use of one's (sexual) tools. At the center of both these topics is the allegorical figure of Lady Nature. The comparative analysis of iconographic depictions of Lady Nature in two fourteenth-century manuscripts, Chicago, University of Chicago Library, 1380 and Paris, Sainte-Genevieve, 1126, and in the fifteenth-century manuscript, Paris, BnF, fr. 23492 reveal new interpretative textual linkages, such as the rapprochement of Lady Nature's confession with Pygmalion's creation of his female statue.

Remembering Christine de Pizan in Paris, BnF, MS fr. 24392, A Manuscript Owned by Anne de France, Duchess of Bourbon

A glowing tribute to Anne de France, duchess of Bourbon, appears on one of the final folios of Paris, BnF, MS fr. 24392, a fifteenth-century collection notable for its rehabilitation of Jean de Meun. The encomium, composed between 1488 and 1498, praises Anne for serving as regent for her brother, the future King Charles VIII. Citing her many attributes, the poet likens Anne's eloquence to that of Christine de Pizan. How and why he makes this comparison is the subject of this two-part article. I conclude that it is not by accident that the encomium poet added his compliment to Anne to Français 24392.

Discovering Dèduit: An examination of the garden setting in the Roman de la Rose

&lt;p class="p1"&gt;Roman de la Rose is a French poem which chronicles the journey of a young man within a secluded garden setting (the Garden of Dèduit). The poem was initially written by Guillaume de Lorris in c.1230 and later completed by Jean de Meun in c.1270. However, the authors’ differing literary styles have resulted in debates surrounding the poem’s meaning. In this study, I address the central interpretative problem by focusing on the illustrated garden setting of Dèduit and its relation to the literary content. Ultimately, I attempt to answer the following questions: How did the medieval audience perceive the garden symbolism? Did the images make a difference in the medieval reader’s understanding of the garden? What are the possible ways in which the medieval reader could interpret this garden symbolism?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div&gt; &lt;/div&gt;&lt;p class="p1"&gt;&lt;strong&gt; &lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

The Rose and Geryon: The Poetics of Fraud and Violence in Jean de Meun and Dante

The Rose and Geryon: The Poetics of Fraud and Violence in Jean de Meun and Dante