Le Roman de la rose – Special Subject

Convenor: Helen Swift (helen.swift@st-hildas.ox.ac.uk)

There is, as yet, no single ‘go to’ book on the Rose, though any criticism by Sylvia Huot, Sarah Kay,
David Hult is certainly immediate ‘go to’ stuff. Whilst many Grant & Cutler guides can feel pitched at
quite an introductory level, Sarah Kay’s on the Rose is quite subtle, and introduces many of the key
bones of contention. She also discusses the Rose in the conclusion to her The Place of Thought book.
The essay in the Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature (available in its entirety online
through Cambridge Companion Online) is also quite a good overview – I feel that it does a bit of a
critical ‘cop out’ at the end, but see what you think!

An excellent overview of scholarship on the Rose is Jonathan Morton’s ‘état present’ for French
Studies: http://www.academia.edu/11386659/%C3%89tat-pr%C3%A9sent_Le_roman_de_la_rose
You can find a reading list on the Rose itself on Weblearn.

A recent, very good overview of later medieval material, with an eye to the "post-Rose" trajectory, is
Adrian Armstrong and Sarah Kay, Knowing Poetry: Verse in Medieval France from the Rose to the
Rhétoriqueurs (2011). Pierre-Yves Badel’s seminal Le Roman de la rose au XIVè siècle (1980) still
merits serious attention.

The precise plan that we follow is very much open to adaptation to suit students’ interests and
needs: some may come already having experience of studying the Rose, others not; some come
already having an idea of what aspects of response they’d like to work on (e.g. Froissart), whilst
others have a more blank canvass. Please get in touch with me to discuss your situation. The
following is therefore an illustrative plan:

Week-by-week plan

1. Rose commentary
lines 2049-96 (so, in GdL’s portion) or lines 15139-15183 (in JdM’s: bit of an artificial cut-off,
I realise, but otherwise it would go on and on!). Line references here relate to the Strubel
edition.

Because the Rose is so vast, it’s quite helpful to start off small, with something quite focused, so that
there’s something concrete on which to peg bigger issues. Don’t worry overly about your
commentary taking any particular form; what I’m interested in most here is a) you’re getting a feel
for some of the features of language that each writer manipulates; b) how elements of the passage
can feed in with larger interpretative questions/issues, thematic and structural (e.g. portrayal of
love, use of personification, characterisation of the je, authorship and authority, etc.). If you could
write something of about 2000 words and send it by email (both to me and to each other, so that
you have chance to engage with each other’s work prior to our discussion) 48 hours before the
supervision.

2. Rose essay
The precise topic of the essay is open – to be determined by your specific interests, e.g. didacticism,
the Rose’s intellectual context, portrayals of sexuality, uses of allegory, issues of authorship and
narrative voice, the thematisation of literary hermeneutics, etc.

3. Le Débat sur ‘le Roman de la rose’

So, moving into the fifteenth century. No essay for this week, to give you more reading/thinking
time. I'd really like you to feel that you have a handle on what the different parties in the debate are
saying, and how they're advancing their points, given that a lot of criticism gives them very sketchy
treatment (du genre "Christine defends women". Um... well....) and only ever cites the same little
nuggets over and over.

Le Débat sur ‘le Roman de la rose’, ed. Eric Hicks (your main primary reading)

Debate of the Romance of the Rose, ed. David Hult (very good contextual and introductory material,
as well as a good translation)

Debating the ‘Roman de la rose’, ed. Christine McWebb (very good introduction by Earl Jeffrey
Richards, and a range of interesting texts that appear more loosely in the ‘debate’, i.e. are not part
of the epistolary exchange that we tend to refer to as the Débat ‘proper’)

Christine de Pizan, L’Epistre au dieu d’amours (in Poems of Cupid: God of Love, ed. Thelma Fenster
and Mary Carpenter Erler) (worth reading, a) if you’re interested in Christine; b) as a different genre
of response to the letters.

Issues to reflect on in general the débat (and do let me know if you need a copy of the Hicks edition
for the week: I have a copy of my own as well as one in SHI library that I could access for you and
leave at Lodge). Your focus here will be the letters (in the Hicks volume), but, if you've time, with
also a glance at Christine's Epistre au dieu d'amours, so we have a prose-verse comparison. For an
introductory look at what's at stake in the débat, see the chapter on it in the Casebook on Christine
de Pizan (ed. McGrady and Bain) and also the introduction to McWebb's volume:

- the main points of contention up for debate here: what’s actually being debated most strongly?
What is most controversial to those involved?
- the role/treatment of gender in the debate: gender in the Rose itself and gender amongst the
participants in the debate
- the views of art (i.e. literary creativity's nature and status) that emerge from/underlie different
participants' stances
- the different ways of tackling Jean de Meun's Rose (either pour or contre): on what grounds is it
defended? What approaches are taken to reproving it? Is it the book or its author that/who are
being targeted more?
- the effectiveness of the debate as a means of addressing points of contention
- to what extent it can be seen as a ‘debate’

4. EITHER Jacques Milet, La Forest de Tristesse

This is where you really get to fly solo as researchers. I will supply you with my transcription, which is
currently the only available ‘edition’, but you might also want to have a look at its original context of
appearance in the c. 1500 anthology published by Antoine Vérard known as the Jardin de plaisance
et fleur de rethoricque. There's a good article on this anthology: Susan R, Kovacs, 'Staging Lyric
Performances in Early Print Culture: Le Jardin de plaisance...', French Studies 15.1 (2001), 1-24, and
insightful comments in a chapter in Jane H. M. Taylor’s The Making of Poetry: Late-Medieval French
Poetic Anthologies. Neither deals with the Forest in particular, not least because it's a narrative
rather than a lyric poem (um, obviously), but it's useful nonetheless to have some appreciation of its
material context. Although the poem was apparently composed, as the opening lines have it, in
1459, we have no extant MS witness. The Jardin, in its several editions, is the only surviving copy of
this long and substantial poem. The only critical commentary on the poem, so far as I know, features
in two articles I've written and in my book. I'd be quite keen for you to hold off reading anything I've
said until after our session - not least because I'm very interested to hear someone else's views
besides my own (and they’ve changed since being in print, in any case)!

Things to think about:

- how is Milet developing the allegorical framework of the poem (i.e. drawing on/adapting the Rose
model)?
- how is debate and dialogue being used?
- would we call this part of the débat sur la rose or part of la querelle des femmes (on which, see
Alcuin Blamires, The Case for Woman in Medieval Culture, and Margarete Zimmermann, "Querelle
des femmes, querelle du livre", in Des femmes et des livres: France et Espagnes, XIVe-XVIIe siècle.
Actes de la journée d'étude organisée par l'Ecole nationale des chartes et l'Ecole normale supérieure
de Fontenay/Saint-Cloud (Paris, 30 avril 1998). ed. Dominique de COURCELLES and Carmen VAL
JULIÁN (Etudes et rencontres de l'Ecole des chartes, 4).

For writing something formally, maybe consider one of the following (in relation to the Forest and
any other Rose reception studied thus far):

1. Consider how Rose responses respond to the idea of journeying and landscape [consider in
whatever sense you like: physical, intellectual, poetic, etc.,]

2. How do Rose responses conjure with the spectre of Jean de Meun?

3. "Debate is a framework for opposing views to become entrenched rather than to interact".
Discuss with relation to the Rose and its late-medieval reception.

Or, if you want to concentrate just on the Forest on its own:

4. "What connects the first and second parts of the Forest (i.e. the forest journey and the court
scene)?" or

5. "Far from denouncing Jean de Meun, Milet keeps him close and endorses his poetics, if not his
ethics"
 4. OR Martin Le Franc

Martin Le Franc, Le Champion des dames, Books 1, 3, and Book 5 from 23625 to end. You can
trim this down (the whole poem is, in any case, 24,000 lines long, so we're already cutting it
down...): make sure you read the digest summary in the introduction to Book 1 and at least top
and tail Book I itself. Book 3 has a lot of Rose-related material, and is also the shortest of the
books, so you may want to focus your attentions there.

There is actually very little criticism on Le Franc (exclude me again, please): the Brook,
Zimmermann, and Muhlethaler items may be worth a look (Go to the International Medieval
Bibliography on OxLip+ (direct link = http://apps.brepolis.net/bmb/search.cfm), then search for
'Martin Le Franc, poet' in 'All fields')

have a think about the following issues:

- in what ways is the influence of the Rose palpable: e.g. matters of form/structural features?
personified figures? narrative episodes? speech?
- how are the procedures of debate used to address the Rose legacy (whether explicitly or
implicitly)
- how prominent *is* gender in this debate?
- what issues relating to authorship and authorial responsibility are raised by the way Le Franc
tackles the Rose?
- does Martin Le Franc present an effective refutation of the Rose?

For essay writing (bringing in whichever authors/texts you wish), how about:

1. "A defence of women is frequently both an essential, but ultimately incidental, part of a
response to the Rose"

OR

2. 'In appropriating Jean de Meun's Rose, many medieval writers sought to make it "proper"'.
Discuss.

4. OR a further essay on the Rose itself

5. Review session

We’ll be wanting to have in mind from this point what you’re considering for your coursework
submission: whether you’re working up an essay/two essays already completed or whether you’re
going to do a fresh piece (deadline: end of Week 10).