Fortune's Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency

Notes

Introduction 1. The annotation is to be found in BN fr 12786, edited recently by Armand Strubel in his Le Roman de la Rose, Lettres Gothiques (Paris: Le Livre de Poché, 1992), 244. The copyist’s addition is not unique among the manuscripts of the romance . In the fourteenth-century BN 1569, for example, we also read, between the two parts of the romance, that Jean de Meun “parfinit” the romance of the “aucteur dit Guient” (28 b). 2. On the influence and reception of the romance in medieval France, see the invaluable studies of Pierre-Yves Badel, Le Roman de la Rose au XIVe siècle: Étude de la réception de l’œuvre (Geneva: Droz, 1980); Sylvia Huot, The Romance of the Rose and Its Medieval Readers: Interpretation, Reception, Manuscript Transmission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); as well as her essays “Authors, Scribes, Remanieurs: A Note on the Textual History of the Roman de la Rose,” in Rethinking the Romance of the Rose: Text, Image, Reception, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 203‒33; and “Medieval Readers of the Roman de la Rose: The Evidence of Marginal Notations ,” Romance Philology 43 (1990): 400‒420. On the querelle de la Rose, see in addition Eric Hicks, ed., Christine de Pizan, Jean Gerson, Jean de Montreuil, Gontier and Pierre Col: Le débat sur le Roman de la Rose, Bibliotèque du XVe siècle, 43 (Paris: Champion, 1977); A. J. Minnis, “Theorizing the Rose: Crises of Textual Authority in the Querelle de la Rose,” in Magister amoris: The Roman de la Rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 209‒56; David F. Hult, “Words and Deeds: Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose and the Hermeneutics of Censorship,” New Literary History 28 (1997): 345‒66; and John V. Fleming, “The Moral Reputation of the Roman de la Rose before 1400,” Romance Philology 18 (1964‒65): 430‒35. On the partial Italian translation of the romance often attributed to Dante, see Luigi Vanossi, Dante e il “Roman de la Rose”: Saggi sul “Fiore,” Biblioteca dell’ ‘Archivium Romanicum,’ ser. 1, 144 (Florence: Olschki, 1979); Earl Jeffrey Richards, Dante and the “Roman de la Rose”: An Investigation into the Vernacular Context of Dante’s “Commedia,” Beihefte zur Zeitschrift der romanischen Philologie, 184 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1981); Gianfranco Contini, “Un nodo della cultura medievale: la serie Roman de la Rose-Fiore-Divina Commedia ,” in Un’idea di Dante (Turin: Einaudi, 1970), 245‒83; and, more recently, The 139 Notes Fiore in Context: Dante, France, Tuscany, ed. Zygmunt Baransky and Patrick Boyde, William and Katherine Devers series in Dante studies, 2 (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996). For the English romaunt, see Ronald Sutherland, ed., The Romaunt of the Rose and Le Roman de la Rose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). On the Dutch reception of the poem, see Dieuwke van der Poel, De Vlaamse “Rose” en “Die Rose” van Heinric: Onderzoekingen over Twee Middelnederlandse Bewerkingen van de “Roman de la Rose” (avec un résumé en français), Middeleeuwse Studies en Bronnen, 13 (Hilversum, Neth.: Verloren , 1989); and “A Romance of a Rose and Florentine: The Flemish Adaptation of the Romance of the Rose,” in Brownlee and Huot, Rethinking the Romance of the Rose, 304‒15. On the posterity of the romance in Italian and European literature , see John V. Fleming’s study, “Augustinus and Franciscus,” in Reason and the Lover (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 136‒83. The romance even had an afterlife in Byzantium: see Henry Kahane and Renée Kahane, “The Hidden Narcissus in the Byzantine Romance of Belthandros and Chrysantza,” Jahrbuch der österreichischen Byzantinistik 33 (1983): 199‒219. 3. Paulin Paris, “Fin du treizième siècle. Trouvères: Le Roman de la Rose,” Histoire Littéraire de la France 23 (1856): 15. 4. Gaston Paris, La littérature française au moyen âge, 5th ed. (1888; rpt., Paris: 1913), 183. In his 1926 essay, “‘Le Roman de la Rose’ et la pensée du XIIIe siècle,” Edmond Faral appears to refer implicitly to this judgment in writing that “le fait est . . . qu’aux quelque quatre mille vers de Guillaume, à ce corps d’œuvre artistiquement mesuré, il [sc., Jean de Meun] a appliqué, sous prétexte de l’achever, une queue monstrueuse de dix-huit mille vers.” See Revue des Deux Mondes, 7th ser., 35 (1926): 435. 5. Ernest Langlois, Le...