The Romance of the rose

The Romance of the Rose, an allegorical dream-vision poem stemming from the troubadour tradition of courtly love and written in medieval French, was perhaps the most widely read book in 14th- and 15th-century Europe. During the century of high scholasticism (the 13th), this most influential of all works of medieval romance emerged. It was composed in two stages. Around 1230, Guillaume de Lorris came out with the first 4,058 lines, without quite finishing it. Around 1275 (the year after the death of both Aquinas and Bonaventure), Jean de Meun, a very different personality who studied at the University of Paris and who warred against the mendicant orders, produced a massive amplification of Guillaume’s work, adding 17,724 lines, shifting towards the encyclopedic and dialectic, changing its character from earnest to satiric.