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The Roman de la rose and Middle English Poetry
Author(s) -
Viereck Gibbs Kamath Stephanie A.
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00667.x
Subject(s) - poetry , middle english , rose (mathematics) , literature , fifteenth , medieval literature , romance , middle ages , art , english poetry , human sexuality , ideology , english literature , history , classics , sociology , politics , ancient history , gender studies , geometry , mathematics , political science , law
The late medieval French allegory, Le Roman de la rose [ The Romance of the rose ], the conjoined production of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, has long been recognized as an important literary influence on Middle English poetry. The majority of recent studies focus on Geoffrey Chaucer’s translation, citation, and adaptation of the Rose . Directions in scholarly study include increasing attention to the formal complexity and polyvalence the model of the Rose provides, on‐going interest in constructions of sexuality and gender, and a greater emphasis on the inter‐relation of Chaucer’s response to the Rose with the responses of French and Italian poets, including Guillaume de Machaut, Eustache Deschamps, Guillaume de Deguileville (or Digulleville), Christine de Pizan, and Giovanni Boccaccio. The discovery of a new manuscript fragment of the Middle English Romaunt of the Rose and the re‐assessment of earlier linguistic exchange also set forth interesting possibilities for future exploration. Beyond the field of Chaucer studies, scholars of late medieval England’s alliterative poems, notably Cleanness but also Piers Plowman , have re‐examined the ways the Rose may have shaped the construction of devotional, sexual, and social ideologies within this poetic tradition. The growing interest in Chaucer’s contemporary John Gower and in the English poetry of the fifteenth century, especially the works of Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate, has brought further recognition of the Rose ’s widespread influence, as well as the continued influence of Rose‐ inspired intermediaries, including not only Guillaume de Deguileville and Christine de Pizan but also Evrart de Conty, Alain Chartier, and Charles d’Orléans. Recalling the attribution of the Rose ’s authorship to an English ‘John Moon’ in early literary histories demonstrates one curious later misreading of Hoccleve’s Middle English response to the Rose and may also provoke a deeper appreciation for the strong continuity of interest in the Rose shared by French and English readers during the turbulent era of the Hundred Years War.