ROMAN DE LA ROSE, Le Ro mance of the Rose'), a poem of nearly 23,000 verses, is the most notable and was for 300 years the most quoted and discussed French writing of the 13th century. More than 200 manuscripts of it have been classified; 18 edi tions were printed between 1481 and 1538; large parts were translated into English and Dutch in the 14th century,• Chaucer used it freely in 'The Canterbury Tales.' The 'Roman' was begun by Guillaume de Lorris, in the style then fashionable of courtly, scholastic allegory, as an Art of Love and, incidentally, of polite be havior, for the use and pleasure of courtiers and their ladies. Under the form of a dream the Lover, aided by Courtesy, Sweet-Looks, Riehes, Fair-Welcome and others, seeks posses sion of a Rose-bud, guarded by Danger, Shame, Evil-Tongue, Jealously and so on. duillaume drew the spirit and substance of his allegory largely from Ovid's 'Ars amatoria,) Chapelain's 'De arte honeste amandP and the writings of Chretien de Troyes. His work was apparently almost ended at his death, sometime between 1225 and 1240. With a brief conclusion by an unknown hand it counted 4,669 verses. Some 40 years later Jean de Meun took up the narra tive in quite different spirit and in 18,000 verses, introducing many new characters, chief among them Reason and Nature, embodied the results of very wide if superficial reading and of dar ing speculations, political, economic, social and moral, anticipating much in Rabelais, Mon taigne and Voltaire. Guillaume was no mean scholar or poet. His allegorical characters show keen analysis. He has faint premonitions of the Renaissance. But Jean's work gave the 'Roman) its abiding interest for it pressed social questions even yet not fully answered. He was a Parisian bourgeois. The site of his house has been identified at 218 Faubourg Saint Jacques. Many other writings, didactic and philosophic, are attributed to him. His pur pose in the 'Roman' was, he says, ewholly for instruction.* In digressions of 1,000 verses and more he seeks to apply Nature and Reason, that is, normal instinct and common-sense, in a thoroughly rationalistic spirit to the claims of royalty and nobility, to the origin of society and the ideas of the state, of justice, taxation and property, to the inequalities in the distri bution of wealth and, with special and often quite misunderstood insistence, to the social position of women, their claim to equality as efree-born,e and the evil effect on their char acters of marriage as it had been developed under medieval institutions. This gives occa
sion for much dramatically lively and often bitter satire. He condemns celibacy. The mendicant orders,typified in False-Semblance, embodiment of slothful hypocrisy, are his peculiar abomination. Speeches put in the mouths of the Duren*, prototype of Chaucer's Wife of Bath, of False-Semblance, the Friend, Reason and Nature, principally in the later half of the 'Roman,' best reveal Jean's radicalism. He finds place, too, for scientific speculations on the illusions of the senses and even on dis sociations of personality. Through all this the allegory winds a slender thread leading to a philosophy of living more emancipated from theology than possibly the author realized. A symbolic celebration of Love as the self-per petuating force of Nature ends with the Rose bud in full bloom. Some two-thirds of Jean's verses hark back to older writers, chiefly Boethius, Alain de Lille and Ovid. He uses also Abelard and Roger Bacon and cites with complacent pedantry a host of others. He thought himself loyal to the Church, but Ilia temperament was practical, positile. Nature and her priest Genius, to whom more than a fifth of the whole poem falls, are the touch stones of his ethics and social philosophy, the real objects of his devotion.
The first scholarly edition of the 'Roman,' by E. Langlois (Paris 1914-) is in course of publication. Mion's edition (4 vols., Paris 1814) was good for its time. Michel's (2 vols., Paris 1864) is convenient, Marteau's (5 vols., Orleans 1878-1900) better. Consult Langlois, E., 'Origines et sources du Roman de la Rose) (Paris 1891) ; id., Manuscrits du Roman de la Rose)(2 vols., Lille 1910), also Bourdil Ion, F. W., (The Early Editions of the Roman de la Rose) (London 1906) ; Ward, C. W., 'The Epistles on the Roman de la (Chicago 1911) ; Guillon, F., 'Jean Clopinel) (Pans 1903) ; Besant, W., 'French Humorists) (Lon don 1873). There is a good, not quite complete, translation by F. S. Ellis (3 vols., London 1900).