The Romance of the Rose and its Medieval Readers
Interpretation, Reception, Manuscript Transmission

Sylvia Huot investigates how medieval readers understood the The Romance of the Rose, assessing the evidence to be found in well over 200 surviving manuscripts.

Sylvia Huot (Author)

9780521039314, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 16 August 2007

424 pages, 28 b/w illus.
22.5 x 15.3 x 2.4 cm, 0.638 kg

The Romance of the Rose was one of the most important works of medieval vernacular literature. It was composed in the thirteenth century and exerted a profound influence on literature in France, England, the Netherlands and Italy for the next 200 years. In this book, Sylvia Huot investigates how medieval readers understood the text, assessing the evidence to be found in well over 200 surviving manuscripts: annotations, glosses, illuminations, marginal doodles, rewritings, expansions and abridgements. This allows a picture to emerge of the interests and concerns of its readers, including such important fourteenth-century figures as the monastic author Guillaume de Deguilleville and the court poet Guillaume de Machaut. The book contains analyses of individual versions of the poem. It offers an interesting perspective on the interpretative difficulties of this learned and complex poem.

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of manuscripts cited
Introduction
1. Perspectives on the Roman de la Rose: the text and its manuscript transmission
2. Intertextual readings of the Rose: marginal glosses and readers' annotations
3. The profitable, pleasurable Rose: the remaniement of Gui de Mori
4. Adapting Jean de Meun to Guillaume de Lorris: the Rose of the B manuscripts
5. Transforming the mirror of lovers: manuscripts of the second group
6. 'Exposé sur le Roman de la Rose': rewriting the Rose in the Pelerinage de vie humaine
7. Poet of love and nature: Guillaume de Machaut and the Rose
8. Sacred and erotic love: the visual gloss of MS Bibl. Nat. fr. 25526
9. Conclusion: the protean Rose
Appendices
Bibliography
Index of manuscripts
General index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB]