A Rose a Day No.26

My book ‘By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose’ was recently published by Oneworld Publications. So, every day for the fast few weeks I have been posting a picture of a rose. They are surprisingly various. I post the same image on my Instagram page : morleypsimon. But in this blog I write a bit of information about the image to contextualize it.

Today’s roses are a giant Gallica Roses in a Flemish illustration from the medieval bestseller the Roman de la Rose, the most famous product of the medieval art of love. It was first published around 1230, then republished around 1275 with a long supplement by another author.

In keeping with the conventions of the period, the Roman is an elaborate allegory cast as a lover’s dream quest. The Lover yearns to pluck a rose which he has seen on a bush reflected in the Fountain of Love at the centre of a walled garden. But he is initially unable to reach his goal because a thicket of thorns protects the rose. This first part of the Roman was written by an aristocrat, Guillaume de Lorris, who was deeply attached to the noble code of love. At the beginning of the story Guillaume writes:

‘The matter is fair and new; God grant that she for whom I have undertaken it may receive it with pleasure. She it is who is so precious and so worthy of being loved that she ought to be called Rose.’  

Guillaume’s narrative, which most scholars believe is unfinished, ends before the Lover gets to pluck the rose – that is, before he attains the object of his desire. But the continuation of the Roman was later by a very different author, one Jean de Meun, a university man rather than an aristocrat, who turns the story into a long and often didactically digressive account that, in many ways, mocks Guillaume’s and the whole courtly love tradition’s delicate and noble goals.

Between the moment of the first sighting and the final deflowering of the Rose, the story the two author share tells of various trials and advice given by a host of allegorical figures including Reason, Chastity, Jealously, Fair Welcome, the God of Love, False Seeming, Constrained Abstinence, Evil Tongue, Courtesy, Largesse, and of course, Venus. But Jean concludes his story as follows:

I grasped the branches of the rose-tree, nobler than any willow, and when I could reach it with both my hands, I began, very gently and without pricking myself, to shake the bud, for it would have been hard for me to obtain it without thus disturbing it. I had to move the branches and agitate them, but without destroying a single one, for I did not want to cause an injury. Even so, I was forced to break the bark a little, for I knew no other way to obtain the thing I so desired.

I can tell you that at last, when I had shaken the bud, I scattered a little seed there. This was when I had touched the inside of the rose-bud and explored all its little leaves, for I longed, and it seemed good to me, to probe its depths. I thus mingled the seed in such a way that it would have been hard to disentangle them, with the result that all the rose-bud swelled and expanded. I did nothing worse than that.

Some lines later, the Lover declares: ‘I plucked with joy the flower from the fair and leafy rose-bush. And so I won my bright red rose. Then it was day and I awoke.’

We don’t need Freud, or an especially dirty mind, to recognize that the quotation from Jean’s finale is a thinly disguised fantasy of sexual dominance and gratification.

Few books have exercised a more profound and enduring influence on the life of any period that the Romaunt of the Rose. It’s popularity lasted for two centuries at least’, wrote the historian Johan Huizinga. “It determined the aristocratic conception of love in the expiring Middle Ages.”[ As the Roman was usually lavishly illuminated, its influence was felt on both a textual and visual level. In the pictures, floral imagery is pervasive, not only because of the importance to the allegorical narrative of the garden setting and the rose-bush, but also as a more abstract decorative motif. In one such illuminated version, a picture shows the moment just before the Lover finally plucks his rose. The deep-pink roses are clearly the Rose de Provins – the Gallica Rose – which would have been very familiar to the readers of the Roman. But it is represented as many times its normal size [Illustration]. 

One reason for the success of the Roman was the scandal it caused. Insofar as the medieval art of love was all about sexually unconsummated, spiritualized, desire rather than conquest and successful physical gratification, Jean’s ending deliberately seems to throw down a challenge to the conventions of courtly romance. The Lover’s desire is very clearly satisfied. In 1399 the female poet and author Christine de Pisan, writing from within the circle of the court of King Charles VI of France, penned an influential Epistre au Dieu d’Amours (Epistle of the God of Love) in which she condemned the Roman as slandering woman, describing it as nothing better than a handbook for lechers. In effect, Jean had restored love to the world of male adventure and aggression, in which the goal is the indulgence of predatory sexual pleasure and the fulfillment of the prerogatives of procreation. 

An influential admirer of the Roman de la Rose was the Englishman Geoffrey Chaucer. As a young man, he began a translation into Middle English, but for reasons unknown only got as far as finishing fragments of Guillaume’s text. The lines I quoted above from the modern English translation to the beginning of Guillaume’s part to the Roman are rendered by Chaucer as follows:

And that is she that hath, ywis,

So mochel pris, and thereto she

So worthy is biloved to be,

That she wel ought, of pris and ryght,

Be cleped Rose of every wight.