Rose novel
The Rosenroman (French: Le Roman de la Rose ) is a verse novel on the subject of love written in the 13th century and is considered the most successful and influential work of medieval French literature . Authors were Jean de Meung and Guillaume de Lorris .
The work is not to be confused with the Roman de la Rose , which goes back to Jean Renart and is also called Guillaume de Dole for the sake of distinctness .
Information about the work
The rose novel consists of 22,068 pairs of rhyming eight-syllable verses and tells a long dream. This dream report shows how the protagonist and first-person narrator (one of the first in French literature) falls in love with a rose and how, after many difficulties, he gets it in the end. Apart from the narrator, the acting characters are not people who can be imagined as real, but allegories like reason or mythological characters like Cupid . The rose in turn symbolizes the woman.
The novel was started around 1235 by Guillaume de Lorris . He apparently had the groundbreaking idea of combining three elements that were present in the literature of his time, but hardly familiar: the form of the first-person narration, the use of allegorical figures as acting characters in a novel and the portrayal of an entire novel as a dream report. However, Guillaume's text broke off as a fragment at verse 4058 (due to his death?). However, somewhere in the middle of it he had let the lover / narrator remark en passant that he would later explain the deeper meaning of the work, and above all had let him hint that he would get the rose at the end of a long battle. Apparently it was these remarks that gave Jean de Meung the idea of a sequel around 1275 , which ended around 1280.
The two parts of the novel are very different. The author of the first part, Guillaume, was a nobleman and obviously wrote for a noble audience. The overall concept he planned was that of an idealistic courtly " ars amatoria " (art of love), through which the lover, thanks to Cupid's teachings and devotedly overcoming resistance and obstacles, should learn the art of wooing and love and thereby experience a moral purification . The text stands in the tradition of courtly poetry of its time, its image of love corresponds to the courtly ideal of love .
The sequel, Jean, was a city dweller and clearly had his eye on the now growing urban reading public. Accordingly, he stands at an ironic distance from the courtly way of thinking of his predecessor and shows a bourgeois, sober mentality. But Jean was also a cleric, and as such, from an almost misogynous basic attitude, he sees love not as an ideal, but as an instinct controlled by nature, and women not as a means of purification, but as a temptation against which he denies reason Alerts lovers. Overall, he represents rationalistic-skeptical, almost materialistic ideas.
content
Part 1 (Guillaume de Lorris)
The work begins with a short preface by the author who announces to the reader / listener that he wants to please his lady with a dream that has come true five years ago when he was twenty. The report contains "the whole art of love" and is called "the novel of the rose". Because with this flower his lady can be compared.
The dream report that follows is placed in the mouth of a first-person narrator, who is at the same time the protagonist of the plot and, as it soon turns out, almost the only figure that can be presented as a real person. It all begins when the narrator arrives in front of a walled, paradisiacal garden, where the owner Déduit (fun, amusement) is dancing and singing with a cheerful company, including Cupid. Let in by Oiseuse (the idle one), the narrator celebrates something, but then explores the garden, secretly pursued by Cupid. In the mirror of a fountain, that of Narcissus, he sees the image of a rosebud, which he immediately looks for, fascinated, and also finds it on a large bush. While trying to approach her, Cupid's arrows hit him. They turn his fascination into love and make him Cupid's vassal. After he has vowed loyalty and obedience, he is taught in detail about the duties and (very clearly) about the inevitable torments of a lover. As he tries to get closer to the rose, he comes up against all sorts of allegorical figures, including Bel-Accueil (friendly welcome) who offers to help, Raison (reason) who warns him, and the villains Malebouche (defamation) , Peur (fear), Honte (shame) and above all Dangier ([illegitimate] claim to power), a monster whose figure subsequently appears again and again in French literature as the embodiment of all powers that hinder and endanger the coming together of lovers. Finally, with the help of Venus , the lover manages to outsmart Dangier and catch a kiss from the rose, but now Jalousie (jealousy) has a castle built around the rose bush and Bel-Accueil locked in the castle tower, so that the lover desperately breaks out into a long lament - which ends the first part.
Part 2 (Jean de Meung)
Jean continues the lover's complaint, but the atmosphere of the text changes immediately. The lover seems more skeptical, more open to doubt. Jean also lets him seek clarification, initially from Raison, who gives him a sober and long lecture about the problems and varieties of love, but informs him in more detail about moral and immoral behavior in general, warns him of Fortuna's capricious behavior and encourages him Resignation of his vassal relationship with Amor urges, which the lover naturally rejects. In the next section, too, the lecture on practical life rules of all kinds that Jean has his character Ami give at the request of the lover, it only deals marginally with the problems of lovers. Obviously, Jean's primary concern is general instruction for his readers. Overall, the plot in Jeans almost comes to a standstill, the actual goal, the rose, seems rather secondary, even if the lover finally achieves it thanks to the help of Cupid and his mother Venus and at the end of a fierce battle between the allegorical figures for the Rose Castle and pick. Jean is constantly creating new opportunities for scholarly and satirical excursions. He discusses philosophical and theological problems such as that of free will , spreads his considerable knowledge of mythological, astrological and natural history and takes a position on current issues, for example by caricaturing the mendicant monk orders or criticizing the rulers and representatives of the church. He sees love as a phenomenon of nature that is subject to its laws and is only marginally influenced by moral ideas.
reception
The success of the work was not affected by the discrepancy between the two parts, because over 300 manuscripts (an enormous number for a medieval text) and around 20 early prints, the last from 1538, have survived. The influence of the work on French literature was correspondingly great, where it made the genre dream poem at home and made allegorical figures a matter of course in all genres. Between about 1300 and 1530 it was read by practically all authors and processed in one form or another. In 1527 Clément Marot tried to revitalize the text by modernizing the language. However, this version only saw four editions before the novel fell victim to the sharp change in literary taste triggered by the rediscovery of antiquity and the onset of cultural influence in Italy.
Many of the manuscripts of the rose novel contain miniatures and are therefore also very interesting for art historians. A late and particularly beautiful manuscript is the one produced and illuminated by Jerôme Acarie for Francis I.
In Geoffrey Chaucer's translation, the rose novel influenced English literature, in a parodistic version perhaps written by Dante , including Italian. He does not seem to have left any noteworthy traces in German-language literature. The title of Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose is a reference to the Roman de la Rose .
The change in meaning to "danger" that the French Word danger (from late Latin dominiarium "rule, claim to rule") in the 14th century, is perhaps the dangerous monster Dangier created by Guillaume de Lorris and his numerous successors in the French. Thanks to literature.
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The dispute over the rose novel
The first known literary controversy in France and in Paris also ignited the rose novel in 1399, following the Epître au Dieu d'Amour (Letter to the God of Love) by Christine de Pizan 1364–1430. In it, Christine criticizes Jean de Meung's negative remarks about women and love. She denounces his drastic and cynical portrayal of physical love as being particularly misogynistic. Christine was supported by the theologian and rector of the Paris University Jean Gerson , other professors such as Jean de Montreuil and the brothers Pierre and Gontier Col took Jean de Meung under protection. Christine herself also took up another position with the Dit [= poem] de la rose (1402), in which she describes the fictitious founding of an "order of roses" protecting women.
literature
- Karl August Ott (ed.): The rose novel. [Old French-German] Munich 1976–1979.
- Christine de Pisan : Epistre au dieu d'amour. [1399]
- Christine de Pisan: Dit de la rose. [1402]
- Ernest Langlois (ed.): Le Roman de la Rose par Guillaume de Lorris et Jean de Meun, publié après des manuscrits. 5 volumes. Paris 1914 ff.
- John V. Fleming: The "Roman de la rose": A Study in Allegory and Iconography. Princeton 1961.
- Ronald Sutherland (Ed.): The Romaunt of the Rose and Le Roman de la rose: A Parallel-Text Edition. Oxford 1967.
- Karl August Ott: The rose novel. Darmstadt 1980.
- Maxwell Luria: A Reader's Guide to the Roman de la Rose. Hampden / Connecticut 1982.
- Georges Duby : The Rose Novel. In: Georges Duby: Reality and courtly dream. To the culture of the Middle Ages. Berlin 1986, pp. 65-102.
- Karl August Ott: Newer studies on the rose novel: To the current state of research. In: Journal for Romance Philology. 104, 1988, pp. 80-95.
- M. Friesen: The rose novel for François Ier. Dissertation . Bonn 1993.
- Heather M. Arden: The Roman de la Rose. An Annotated Bibliography. New York / London 1993.
Web links
- Roman de la Rose. Paris 1505 / illustrations
- Article in "Name, title and dates of the French. Literature " (main source for" information about the work "," content "and" reception ")
- Text of the "Roman de la Rose" by Projekt Gutenberg (This edition from 1878 is scientifically outdated, but contains a detailed summary of the content in the opening credits.)
- Roman de la Rose Digital Library at Johns Hopkins University