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Among its collection of French manuscripts, the National Library of Paris possesses an early-fourteenth-century codex containing the text of a poem divided in two parts. At the point in the manuscript in which the two sections of the text are joined, the scribe who copied the work inserted, in bright red letters, the following remark: “And since the matter pleased so many people, master Jean Chopinel of Meun decided to complete the book and to continue its matter” (Et pour que la matiere embelissoit a plusors, il plot a maistre Jean Chopinel de Meun a parfaire le livre et a ensivre la matiere).1 The anonymous fourteenth-century scribe thus resolved, in a single sentence , the enigma at the center of the “book” (livre) of medieval French literature which was most often copied, read, and debated in the Middle Ages and which, soon after its completion, entered into European literary history as a whole through its translations into Italian, English, and Dutch:2 the Romance of the Rose, begun most likely around 1240 by Guillaume de Lorris and finished approximately forty years later by Jean de Meun. Continuation (ensivre) and completion (parfaire) are the terms by which the scribe, copying the romance , defined the activity of the second author of the work and, by extension , the structure of the entire romance as a finished whole. They are the forms, therefore, by which the copyist identified the bipartite structure of the work written by two authors in two cultural, intellectual, and institutional conditions; and they are equally those by which he characterized the double work as still one work, a single romance. It is precisely on this issue that the judgment of the medieval copyist diverges most radically from that of modern 1 Introduction The Sense of a Book readers of the poem. The classical nineteenth- and twentieth-century critical assessment of the Roman de la Rose can even be characterized as a coherent and repeated negation of precisely the two forms, “continuation” and “completion ,” by which the scribe conceived of the relation of Jean de Meun’s text to the romance of Guillaume de Lorris. In 1856 Paulin Paris already contested the continuity that would appear to bind the “first” Roman de la Rose to the “second ,” writing that Jean treats Guillaume’s poem as a mere “occasion” for his own.3 Gaston Paris repeated the claim in 1888, when he wrote that, for Jean, Guillaume’s tale of the “conquest of the rose . . . is nothing more than an excuse [prétexte].”4 In the first critical edition of the Roman de la Rose Ernest Langlois articulated the same judgment more fully, stating that “Jean de Meun’s frame of mind is in absolute opposition to that of Guillaume de Lorris .”5 The authoritative thesis was then echoed by the great figures of earlytwentieth -century Romance philology. In Alfred Jeanroy’s 1921 Histoire des lettres we read that the poem that Jean de Meun “sets out to bring to its conclusion is clearly of almost no interest to him at all.”6 In his 1924 essay “La littérature allégorique et le Roman de la Rose” Edmond Faral argued that the poems of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun constitute not a unitary work but, rather, merely the agglomeration of “two heterogeneous poems” (deux poèmes hétéroclites).7 By the time C. S. Lewis published The Allegory of Love, the first great English consideration of the Roman de la Rose, in 1938, the thesis had become canonical: “it is as well to make clear at the outset,” Lewis wrote, among his introductory remarks to the second half of the poem, “that Jean’s work is only in a very superficial sense the continuation of Guillaume’s. . . . He chose to continue a work in which the unity of subject was conspicuous: but he himself had no interest in that subject.”8 Denying the continuity between the work of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, the first critical readers of the Roman de la Rose also rejected the claim that the second part of the poem could be said, in the words of the medieval scribe, to “perfect” and “complete” the first. There can be completion only where there has been the articulation and development of an ordered whole, and the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century philologists were unanimous in arguing that it is precisely such an ordered whole that is absent...

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