JEAN DE MEUN or DE METJNG (1250?-1305?), whose original name was Jean Clopinel or Chopinel, was born at Meun sur-Loire. Tradition asserts that he studied at the University of Paris. At any rate he was, like his contemporary, Rutebeuf, a defender of Guillaume de Saint-Amour and a bitter critic of the mendicant orders. Most of his life seems to have been spent in Paris, where he possessed, in the Rue Saint-Jacques, a house described in 1305 as the house of the late Jean de Meung. Jean de Meun says that in his youth he composed songs that were sung in every public place and school in France. In the enumeration of his own works he places first his continuation of the Roman de la rose of Guillaume de Lorris (q.v.). The date of this second part is generally fixed between 1268 and 1285 by a reference in the poem to the death of Manfred and Conradin, executed (1268) by order of Charles of Anjou (d. 1285), who is described as the present king of Sicily. M. F. Guillon (Jean Clopinel, 1903), how ever, considering the poem primarily as a political satire, places it in the last five years of the 13th century. Jean de Meun doubtless edited the work of his predecessor, Guillaume de Lorris, before using it as the starting-point of his own vast poem, running to 29,000 lines. The continuation of Jean de Meun is a satire on the monastic on celibacy, on the nobility, the papal see, the excessive pretensions of royalty, and especially on women and marriage. Guillaume had been the servant of love, and the ex ponent of the laws of "courtoisie"; Jean de Meun added an "art of love," exposing with brutality the vices of women, their arts of deception, and the means by which men may outwit them.
shows in the highest degree, in spite of the looseness of its plan, the faculty of keen observation, of lucid reasoning and exposition, and it entitles him to be considered the greatest of French mediaeval poets. He handled the French language with an ease and precision unknown to his predecessors, and the length of his poem was no bar to its popularity in the 13th and i4th centuries. Part of its vogue was no doubt due to the fact that the author, who had mastered practically all the scientific and literary knowl edge of his contemporaries in France, had found room in his poem for a great amount of useful information and for numerous citations from classical authors.
Jean de Meun translated in 1284 the treatise, De re militari, of Vegetius into French as Le livre de Vegece de Part de chevalerie (ed. Ulysse Robert, Soc. des anciens textes fr., 1897). He also produced a spirited version, the first in French, of the letters of Abelard and Heloise. A 14th-century ms. of this translation in the Bibliotheque Nationale has annotations by Petrarch. His translation of the De consolatione philosophiae of Boetius is preceded by a letter to Philip IV. in which he enumerates his earlier works, two of which are lost— De spirituelle amitie from the De spirituali amicitia of Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1166), and the Livre des merveilles d'Hirlande from the Topographia Hibernica, or De Mirabilibus Hiberniae of Giraldus Cam brensis (Giraud de Barry). His last poems are doubtless his Testament and Codicille. The Testament is written in quatrains in monorime, and contains advice to the different classes of the community.
See also Paulin Paris in Hist. lit. de la France, xxviii. and E. Lang lois in Hist. de la langue et de la lit. francaise, ed. L. Petit de Julleville, ii. (1896), and the introd. to Langlois's 1914 ed. of the Roman de la rose (q.v.).