Chaucer experimented with the numerous lyric forms which the French poets had brought to perfection; he also translated, in whole or in part, the most important of medieval French narrative poems, the thirteenth century 'Romance of the Rose' of
Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung, a very clever satirical allegory, in many thousand lines, of medieval love and medieval religion.
The beauty of Renaissance gardens invited courtly trysts and inspired works like
Guillaume de Lorris' Romance of the Rose, a chivalric classic dedicated to supreme love goddess Venus and a general advisory on how to win a lady's heart.
The long French allegorical poem of the 13th century, the Roman de la Rose, begun in 1237 by
Guillaume de Lorris and finished before 1280 by Jean de Meung, took as its theme the story of the difficult progress of the courtly lover toward his goal, expressing it as a dream adventure within a walled garden; the lady's love is represented as a rosebud, enclosed by a thick thorn hedge.
In
Guillaume de Lorris's Roman de la rose, Akbari finds structural analogy with optical theory, in so far as the shape of the narrative reflects the effect of a mirror.
Focusing on Benoit de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, Bernart de Ventadorn's 'Can vei la lauzeta mover', and
Guillaume de Lorris's Roman de la rose, the article argues that this counter-claim is caught up in a larger process of affirmation.
The trick that Jean de Meun plays occurs in the mid-point of the conjoined text: in a speech by Amor, the Lover, Amant, is suddenly named as
Guillaume de Lorris. Guillaume has pledged to Amor that he will begin a romance in which Amor's commandments will be written down.
As
Guillaume de Lorris noted years before Marian poetry was in vogue and Sceve wrote his Delie, when "la rose entre espines fleurit," it is alw ays the poet whose heart is pricked:
My examination of the tale of Narcissus from
Guillaume de Lorris' Roman de la Rose, the discourse of Pier della Vigna from Dante's Inferno 13, and the speech of a metamorphosed Fileno in Boccaccio's Filocolo suggests the extent to which medieval narratives incorporate and forestall endings, in the process negotiating an intimate, symbiotic relationship between openness and closure.