Roman de la Rose: A Study in Allegory and Iconography

297 Pages·1969·30.84 MB·English

by  John V. Fleming

This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Fri, 23 Sep 2016
13:39:35 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
THE ROMAN DE LA ROSE
A Study in Allegory and Iconography
This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Fri, 23 Sep 2016 13:39:35 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Fri, 23 Sep 2016 13:39:35 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
THE
ROMAN DE LA ROSE
A Study in
Allegory and Iconography
B Y J O H N V . F L E M I N G
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
I969
This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Fri, 23 Sep 2016 13:39:35 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Copyright © 1969 by Princeton University Press
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Library of Congress Card: 68-56308
S.B.N. 691-06158-0
Printed in the United States of America
by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey
This book has been composed in Linotype Caslon Old Face
This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Fri, 23 Sep 2016 13:39:35 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Preface
ECENT years have witnessed a quickening interest
in the Roman de la Rose, if the appearance of
increasing numbers of scholarly studies is a reli­
able indication.1 Yet as any scholar who has
blenched before the annually expanding girth of
the PMLA bibliography knows, recent years have
by this standard witnessed a quickening interest in everything, so
that it may be premature to applaud what is possibly a mere inci­
dental statistic in the publications explosion as the end of the sad
eclipse which has for several centuries almost totally obscured
this great medieval poem from the sympathetic attention of
literary scholars. Perhaps the most promising sign is the publica­
tion now in progress of a new and welcome edition of the poem.
In any case, it has seemed to me that there is still a marked need
for a book which defines the subject of the Roman—to explain
in general terms what the Roman is about—and such is my mod­
est ambition in the present work. The principles which have
guided my inquiry are explained in the first chapter, so that there
is probably little required by way of prefatory material.
The neglect of the Roman de la Rose by romance philologists is
curious but massive, and the most important work on the poem
done in recent years comes from the hands of various "English"
scholars—C. S. Lewis, Alan Gunn, Charles Muscatine, D. W.
Robertson, Rosemond Tuve. Most "English" scholars, I suppose,
first encounter the Roman in the fragmentary translation ascribed
to Chaucer. My pleasure in the old poem began there, at any
rate, even as my serious scholarly interest in it was born of
incredulity at the brief account of the poem introducing the
Romaunt in the Robinson edition. Soon thereafter I had the
opportunity to hear a quite different interpretation of the poem
advanced by Professor D. W. Robertson, Jr., which excited not
merely incredulity but outrage; and the fruitful argument which
began then has become fiercer over the years during which I have
been forced to retreat from a broad front to the obsessive defense
1 For an annotated bibliography of recent work on the Roman see Marc-Rene
Jung, "Der Rosenroman in der Kritik seit dem 18. Jahrhundert," Romanische
Forschungen, LXXVIII (1966), 203-57.
This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Fri, 23 Sep 2016 13:40:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
PREFACE
of a few iconographic minutiae. The Roman is the most important
(in the sense of being the most widely-read and most influential)
vernacular poem of the Middle Ages. Robertson's achievement
in offering the first convincing interpretation of it in five and a
half centuries is a particularly impressive one, and I have been
extremely fortunate in enjoying his guidance as a student and, in
recent years, his counsel as a colleague.
There may be said to be a polemical tradition connected with
the Roman. Jean de Meun himself freely used such sources as
William of Saint-Amour's De fericulis novissimorum temporum,
a work which perhaps exceeds the restraining limits set down
for polite academic debate, and the first sustained critical discus­
sion of the Roman itself is aptly called the "Querelle du Roman
de la Rose." In this debate extreme positions were articulated:
Gerson said he would gladly burn the last copy of the poem in
existence, and Jean de Montreuil accused Christine de Pisan of
acting like a Greek whore. Hardly less violent has been the quar­
rel about the Quarrel, as anyone who has read Andre Combes'
arraignment of Alfred Coville must agree. My own opinion is
that the vast bulk of recent scholarship dealing with Jean de
Meun's poem, much of it from the pens of learned and distin­
guished scholars, is fundamentally wrong-headed, and that the
critical judgments which emerge from it frequently do not stop
short of absurdity. While I have seen no purpose in a systematic
review of other people's ideas about the Roman, it has seemed
wrong to me to avoid altogether confrontation with published
opinions with which I disagree. There is, accordingly, a certain
amount of sharp comment in this book, directed at specific schol­
arly assessments of the Roman and at general critical principles
which are, in my view, stumbling-blocks not only to the under­
standing of Jean's poem but to much else in medieval literary
and pictorial art besides. Since my book presents what is at the
moment very much a minority view of the Roman, it has been
necessary at times to argue especially vigorously, but I hope it is
always apparent that my arguments are advanced in a spirit of
critical inquiry and scholarly debate. I have small doubt that those
with whom I here take issue will be less open in the expression
of their judgment of my work. Jean de Meun, of course, was
able to offer up his book for the correction of Sainte Iglise 5 it is a
further testimony to the general decline in human felicity since
Vl
This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Fri, 23 Sep 2016 13:40:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
PREFACE
the thirteenth century that I can turn only to the Modern Lan­
guages Association of America.
My most pressing scholarly debts I have acknowledged in my
footnotes. Anyone working with the text of the Roman leans
heavily on the monumental edition of Ernest Langlois (Societe
des anciens textes frangais, 5 vols., Paris, 1914-1924), from which
citations in the present work are taken; and anyone working with
the manuscripts must begin with his serviceable catalogue.2 So
far as the iconography is concerned, the path is stonier. It is greatly
to be regretted that Miintz never brought to publication the study
of the iconography of the Roman which he had undertaken}3 he
was one of the great art historians of his day, and enormously
learned. One suspects that his study would have been altogether
more satisfactory than that of Alfred Kuhn.4 Kuhn's work was a
great pioneering effort, completed under difficult conditions, and
it has the great virtue of presenting a substantial corfus of illus­
trations of the Roman including the complete sequence from a
y
fine fourteenth-century exemplar in Vienna. But the narrow focus
of Kuhn's stylistic study, his apparently total lack of interest in
the Roman as a poem, and the very substantial number of errors
in his descriptions and discussions of the manuscripts all weaken
his work and limit its usefulness.
The greatest influence on my own approach to the Roman, as
will be obvious, is the fundamental iconographic analysis of the
poem in Robertson's Preface to Chaucer (Princeton, 1963). The
appearance of Rosemond Tuve's Allegorical Imagery (Princeton,
1966) with its extended and often brilliant analysis of the Roman,
which independently concurs with the main lines of Robertson's
argument, suggests that perhaps at last criticism of the poem is
being redirected along tenable lines. The iconographic materials
which Miss Tuve adduced for her particular purpose of docu­
menting the "posterity" of medieval poems in the Renaissance
are necessarily late in date, and her use of them is frequently
cavalier} yet the conviction of her general approach argues per-
2 Les vidnuscriii du Roman de la Rose (Lille, 1910).
3 "Iconographie du Roman de la Rose," Academie des Inscriftions et Belles-
Lettres: Comftes Rendus, 4ε, serie, xxvn (1899), 15-16.
4 Die Illustration des Rosenromans (Freiburg-im-B. diss., 1911), republished
in expanded form under the same title in the Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen
Sammlungen des allerhochsten Kaiserhauses, xxxi (1913), 1-66.
Vll
This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Fri, 23 Sep 2016 13:40:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
PREFACE
suasively for the possibilities of its method. It would be wrong to
neglect C. S. Lewis' beautiful book The Allegory of Love; the
main lines of its account of the Roman are brilliantly wrong, but
scattered about its pages lie some stunning obiter dicta without
which students of the poem would be much the poorer. I have also
found the specialized articles of Lionel Friedman particularly
enlightening and stimulating.
As the subtitle of my book indicates, one of my principal con­
cerns has been iconographic analysis—the study of the illustrations
in a very large number of manuscripts of the Roman. The ration­
ale for this investigation is explained in the first chapter, but it is
probably necessary to anticipate in a formal way one specific objec­
tion. It has recently been maintained that the study of emblematic
iconography in the manuscripts of the Roman can have "no rele­
vance" since, it is claimed, "the context is secular":6 in a religious
work the reader would feel what is called a "push" towards under­
standing traditional emblems, but in a "secular" work there would
be no "push" and hence no iconographic understanding. This
strikes me as a peculiarly ignorant and unhappy misconception.
What may be regarded as the most typical copies of the Roman
produced in northern France in the second half of the fourteenth
century were made up with the Testament de maistre Jehan de
Meun at the same time and as part of the same manuscript, writ­
j
ten by the same scribes and illustrated by the same illuminators.
Are we really to believe that the readers of these manuscripts,
while "pushed" by the context to comprehend the Gothic icon
of the Trinity which decorates the incifit folio of the Testament,
would find "no relevance" in the fact that Oiseuse appears as a
Gothic icon of luxuria in the Roman} What of such a copy of the
poem as MS frangais 25526 in the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris,
the 163 folios of which are lavishly decorated, recto and verso,
with the most wide-ranging exemplary marginalia? Would the
readers be unable to understand the lengthy sequences illustrating
the life of Christ, His childhood and His Passion, just as they
would regard the "secular" horse who nervously attends the
copulating "pilgrims" at folio 11 iT as merely a decorative detail
without conceptual relevance?
The medieval readers of the Roman were not, I think, pushed
B F. Parmisano in Medium fiLvum, xxv (1966), 279.
This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Fri, 23 Sep 2016 13:40:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
PREFACE
and pulled and jerked about as they went from one folio of their
manuscript to the next because they had no rigorously discrete
categories of the "secular" and the "sacred." R. G. Collingwood
has written with his wonted aptness to this very point. "The
Gothic style of the churches was the Gothic style of the house and
the castle"; he says, "it was simply everyday architecture turned
to the construction of one building instead of another. So in the
book painting what we should call sacred and secular subjects are
inextricably blended; the fact being that the artist never contem­
plated the existence of the distinction which to us is so real. All art
was religious art, or, what comes to the same thing, all art was
secular art; there was no special kind of art used for religious
purposes, because there was no feeling that these purposes stood
by themselves."6
So far as the Roman de la Rose is concerned, the relevance of
iconographic study seems indisputable, and the first chapter of my
book attempts to explain some specific ways in which such study
can aid literary history. The uniquely abundant and diverse ico­
nography of the Roman offers an unusual perspective on a major
medieval poem, and the critical judgments which iconographic
analysis yield both complement and confirm judgments which
emerge from rhetorical analysis and the study of relevant intellec­
tual background. But the iconographic "method" is merely one of
many tools at the scholar's disposal, and an imperfect one at that.
Except in the rare instance of holographic illustration (as in the
Barberino codex of the Documenti d'Amore), the iconographic
schedule of a medieval text is a gloss at one remove at least from
the author's own hand. Furthermore, we know far too little about
the actual ways in which copies of the Roman were commissioned
and executed; the degree to which illustrators followed formal
instructions, existing exemplars, and iconographic cliches from
sources outside the Roman rather than simply their own reading
of the text; and, in many cases, the kinds of people for whom
illustrated copies were made. So while it seems to me absurd to
argue that the analysis of pictorial iconography can have "no rele­
vance" for the study of the Roman, it would be equally wrong to
look upon the "method" as a safe and sufficient one in itself. The
present book makes no such assumption; its discussion of pictorial
6 Speculum, Mentis (Oxford, 1924), pp. 27-28.
This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Fri, 23 Sep 2016 13:40:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms