Debating the ‘Roman de la rose’: A Critical Anthology (review)

This useful anthology of texts fulfils its aim of broadening the debate over the Roman de la rose beyond the confines of the epistolary exchange between Christine de Pizan et al. in the early 15th century. It demonstrates that from 1340–1410 writers responded to the conjoined work in various ways, employing a multitude of voices to defend, criticise or rewrite this seminal text. Moreover, as Richards’s stimulating introduction argues, the Rose’s reception needs to be seen in the context of Italian writers who challenged the cultural dominance asserted by the French, of English claims to the throne of France through the female line, and of contemporary philosophical debates conducted at the University of Paris. Consequently, the anthology includes texts in Italian and Latin as well as French, although the Rose’s reception in England is not discussed. Each chapter ostensibly treats a different set of responses to the Roman, bringing together a number of relevant extracts which are translated into English prose and accompanied by introductory remarks and detailed notes. However, the epistolary debate is rather confusingly presented over two chapters and there is little discussion of voice in chapter 4. There is a full bibliography of primary and secondary sources, and passages from the Rose referred to in this collection are supplied by a searchable web resource found at http://margot.uwaterloo.ca/ . McWebb has done us a great service in collecting this material (although she uses existing more-or-less reliable editions – for a start the punctuation of Li Muisis’s poems could be improved). However, her translations (of verse in particular) can be approximate and sometimes inaccurate. For example, ‘Wiseus estre’ (6,63) surely means ‘to be unoccupied, slothful’ not ‘being vicious’; ‘Si n’ay mestier’ (6,52) does not imply ‘no longer’; ‘siert-on’ (4,15) is from the verb to serve not to follow; ‘lequel ver expose’ means ‘which verse is expounded upon by’ not ‘exposing a serpent’ (19,5), the subjunctive is mistranslated on pp. 28, 10 and 25 and ‘aucune fois vault pis’ (28,8) means ‘sometimes is worse’ not ‘no worse . . . than’. Moreover, prose translations are not always printed on the page facing the verse originals and the independent line numbering makes comparison very difficult. There are many infelicities of style and expression: ‘quote’ for ‘quotation’ (passim), the erotic quest is a ‘voyage’ (p. xi), authors are called Meun, Lorris and de Pizan, Malebouche is translated as Foul Mouth rather than Slander, and the language of the work is called Middle High French (p. xix)! No evidence is supplied for the precise dating of Guillaume’s contribution to 1236. The volume should have been edited more rigorously: the Liber Lamentationum is dated 1290 on page 24, yet on page 27 in the short introductory section on Matheolus and le Fèvre the former’s dates are ‘ca. 1295-?’. Inexplicably there are no texts in this section, even though the Lamentations mentions the Rose in its prologue. In sum, the execution of this project does not live up to its conception, but it is still good to have these texts so conveniently gathered together.