This is the first English translation of Il Fiore, the late-thirteenth-century narrative poem in 232 sonnets based on the Old French Roman de la Rose, and the Detto d'Amore, a free-wheeling version of many Ovidian precepts of love in 240 rhymed couplets. The elaborate allegory of the Fiore presents the complex workings of love, understood primarily as carnal passion, in the human psyche through the use of personifications of a wide array of characters who engage in various social (and bellic) interactions. There are personifications of social stereotypes and attitudes, mythological figures, abstract qualities, psychological and physical states, and personality traits. The Detto d'Amore includes features of the perennial controversy between proponents of the pleasures of erotic passion and those who counsel pursuit of the sublime joys found solely in the exercise of reason. The incomplete poem also contains a conventionalized--and idealized--description of the physical traits of the lady, as well as a portrait of the perfect courtly lover. The importance of these two works lies in part in their possible attribution to the great Florentine poet Dante Alighieri. But even if Dante is not the author, the Fiore is a valuable witness to the literary taste and cultural concerns of medieval Italy and to matters of poetic influence and reception among different literary traditions.

Publisher 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.

The Romance of the Rose has been a controversial text since it was written in the thirteenth century. There is evidence for radically different readings as as early as the first half of the fourteenth century. The text provided inspiration for both courtly and didactic poets. Some read it as a celebration of human love; others as an erudite philosophical work; still others as a satirical representation of social and sexual follies. On one hand it was praised as an edifying treatise, on the other condemned as lascivious and misogynistic. Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot and the contributors to this volume—Pierre-Yves Badel, Emmanuele Baumgartner, John V. Fleming, Robert Pogue Harrison, David F. Hult, Stephen G. Nichols, Lee Patterson, Daniel Poirion, Karl D. Uitti, Dieuwke E. van der Poel, and Lori Walters—represent all the major areas of current work on the Romance of the Rose, both in American and in Europe. The volume will be of value to students and scholars of medieval literature, intellectual history, and art history.

The detailed introduction provides an account of the historical and linguistic aspects of the text as well as a discussion of its meaning and significance responsive to developments in the sphere of Rose criticism proper. There is a full, up-to-date bibliography, glossary, table of references from the Fiore to the canonical Dante, and specialised rhetorical and technical index."--BOOK JACKET.