The 'Roman de la Rose' and Thirteenth-Century Thought

Description

The thirteenth-century allegorical dream vision, the Roman de la Rose, transformed how medieval literary texts engaged with philosophical ideas. Written in Old French, its influence dominated French, English and Italian literature for the next two centuries, serving in particular as a model for Chaucer and Dante. Jean de Meun's section of this extensive, complex and dazzling work is notable for its sophisticated responses to a whole host of contemporary philosophical debates. This collection brings together literary scholars and historians of philosophy to produce the most thorough, interdisciplinary study to date of how the Rose uses poetry to articulate philosophical problems and positions. This wide-ranging collection demonstrates the importance of the poem for medieval intellectual history and offers new insights into the philosophical potential both of the Rose specifically and of medieval poetry as a whole.

Jonathan Morton is an Assistant Professor in the French and Italian Department at Tulane University and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. He is the author of The 'Roman de la rose' in its Philosophical Context: Art, Nature, and Ethics (2018) and is working on a monograph on the medieval technological imaginary. Marco Nievergelt is a Senior Teaching Fellow in English at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Allegorical Quests from Deguileville to Spenser (2012) and is working on a project entitled Medieval Allegory as Epistemology: Dream-Vision Poetry on Language, Cognition, and Experience.