Jean de Meun

Jean de Meun was a 13th-century French poet who completed the allegorical Romance of the Rose and translated works by Boethius and Vegetius.

The Romance of the Rose: A medieval French allegorical poem begun by Guillaume de Lorris and continued by Jean de Meun. Jean de Meun added most of the poem’s surviving length and its sharply different intellectual voice.
Allegory: A mode of representation in which characters or events signify ideas beyond their literal roles. Jean de Meun turns abstract forces into speakers who argue across the poem.
Medieval University of Paris: A major medieval center of teaching and scholarship that developed in Paris during the 12th and 13th centuries. Jean de Meun’s learned writing reflects the intellectual culture associated with Paris.
Christine de Pizan: A late medieval French writer known for defending women and writing on political and moral subjects. She criticized the poem’s treatment of women during the controversy over the Romance of the Rose.
Guillaume de Lorris: A 13th-century French poet who began The Romance of the Rose. His courtly dream poem supplied the unfinished work Jean de Meun continued.
Personification: A figure of speech or narrative device that gives human traits or agency to nonhuman things or abstractions. Figures such as Nature and Reason make philosophical positions act as characters.
Scholasticism: A medieval method of study that used structured reasoning to examine authoritative texts and disputed questions. The continuation’s extended debates resemble the disputational habits of scholastic learning.
Jean Gerson: A French theologian and chancellor of the University of Paris who wrote against the Romance of the Rose. His moral objections helped turn disagreement over Jean de Meun’s poem into a public debate.
Medieval allegory: A literary mode in which characters, events, or settings convey abstract ideas through sustained symbolic representation. Jean de Meun uses personified abstractions to stage debates about love, nature, and society.
Boethius: A late antique Roman philosopher whose works joined classical philosophy with Christian thought. Jean de Meun translated Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy into French.

Linked from 3 pages