I.—INTRODUCTION.
From its first appearance the Roman de la Rose enjoyed great vogue. We observe in this connection the glowing tributes of contemporary and succeeding writers, the numerous manuscripts, which compensate for the art of printing not then invented, the translations into English, Dutch, Italian, and other languages. Even the numerous paintings and tapestries of scenes from the romance point to its great popularity. Perhaps the remark of M. A. Coville crystallizes the general opinion:
“Parmi les livres du siècle précédent, un surtout fut lu de tous, admiré des uns, ardemment discuté par les autres, c’est le Roman de la Rose. La seconde partie avec sa science pédante, ses allégories, ses artifices, devint une nouvelle Bible, et Jean Clopinel de Meun, l’auteur, passa pour un véritable prophète. On retrouve son influence surtout chez les poètes et les moralistes.”[1]
Naturally (and this is also an indirect testimony to the influence of the Roman de la Rose) there were those who found matter for serious complaint in the work of Jean de Meung, who in the second part placed the work of Guillaume de Lorris on a basis of profound philosophical import. As we shall see, Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris, saw the danger to morals in the average man’s reception of a poem which tended to free him from all restraint. Christine de Pisan, too, with a much narrower range of thought, assails with singular energy and with the courage of her convictions a book which contains so many attacks on her sex.
If we analyse critically the influence of the second part of the Roman de la Rose we shall see that its fundamental purpose or idea (whether altogether so intended by Jean de Meung or not does not matter) was to disseminate in a popular form the philosophy of the Latin writers. To Jean de Meung must be given credit for the manner of the work, the handling of the material, but for the subject matter he is indebted to Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, etc., and especially to the De Consolatione Philosophiæ of Boethius, the De Nuptiis of Theophrastus, the De Planctu Naturæ of Alain de Lille, and to the Ars Amatoria and Metamorphoses of Ovid.[2] As a popular exposition of the favorite doctrines of Latin philosophy, as an encyclopædia of knowledge on almost every subject, good and evil, the nature of government, the Church, society, morals, manners, women, etc., etc., the Roman de la Rose was admired by the bourgeois, the average man. At a time when learning was only for the favored few, it is not much wonder that those who had formerly been excluded from the magic pale treasured a work which opened wide for them the portals of mental advancement.
It is this freedom of expression, so novel because so bold in the age in which he lived, that makes him characteristically French; while the objects to which it was directed, the attempt to be encyclopædic, and the constant appeal to a clear and uncompromising reason, lead us to agree (as far as such comparisons will hold) with Gaston Paris that Jean de Meung is the Voltaire of the Middle Ages. In this sense, too, he may be regarded as representing the Aufklärung which was logically required to prepare the way for the new and larger enthusiasm of the Renaissance.
About twenty-five years after Jean de Meung finished his masterpiece, another work was written which vehemently supported his attacks on women and marriage. This was the Lamenta of Matheolus, translated into French about the middle of the fourteenth century by Jean le Fèvre under the title Les Lamentations de Matheolus.[3] Matheolus (or Mahieu as he was called in the dialect of his own district) looked at marriage from the standpoint of one who had suffered much from that institution. He was deprived of the privileges of the clerical order because he had married a widow, and failed to find in the latter’s society sufficient compensations for this sacrifice. The Lamenta, inaccessible to the multitude, as had been indeed the sayings of the great Latin writers before they were put into popular form by Jean de Meung, became very widely read in the French translation made by Jean le Fèvre. It is interesting for us to note as chief sources of Matheolus’ work: the De Nuptiis of Theophrastus, the De Planctu Naturæ of Alain de Lille, the collections of Exempla, and possibly the Roman de la Rose itself.
Jean le Fèvre, however, surprised at the success of the Lamentations in strengthening the hold of the philosophy of life taught in the Roman de la Rose, or feeling that this vivid presentation of the evils of the married state was considerably overdrawn, tried to stem the tide of feeling by writing a refutation of the Lamentations, which he called the Livre de Leesce.[4] This praiseworthy attempt failed completely, and the book against which it was directed, in spite of the attacks of Christine de Pizan,[5] who saw its real character, became more and more popular.
The influence of the Roman de la Rose is evident in the Roman de Fauvel[6] (which is likewise composed of two independent parts) particularly in its satires on the different classes of society and in its general pessimistic outlook upon life; and is still more strongly seen in the Registre of Gilles li Muisis.[7]
This Benedictine abbot was a great admirer of the famous romance, and traces of the thought contained therein may be plainly seen in his long arraignment of conditions then existing, as compared with the ætas dorea, which to his old man’s fancy had existed when he was a youth.
Eustache Deschamps (1338?-1415) naturally belongs on the side of Jean de Meung (whose disciple he may be said to be) with numerous ballades and his long poem against marriage, Le Miroir de Mariage.[8] In the works of Deschamps we find the epicureanism combined with the gift of genuine satire that we notice in the work of his master. Le Miroir de Mariage is not mentioned here, however, because it had a direct bearing upon our controversy. It seems not to have been known to Christine de Pizan or to her allies. It does nevertheless afford additional evidence of the far-reaching influence of the Roman de la Rose.
We remark that up to this point the great popularity of the Roman de la Rose had carried everything before it. Its influence upon literature was supreme. It was the masterly work which terminated the middle ages. But there was to be a reaction against its doctrines and we come now to the first public challenge of the work of Jean de Meung, at the beginning of the fifteenth century.
Christine de Pizan was not the first woman to resent the insinuations against the feminine sex contained in many parts of the Roman de la Rose, if we are to believe the rather doubtful legend[9] concerning the ladies of the court who were going to whip the author, but she is certainly the first woman-writer to champion publicly the cause of her sex, insulted, as she believed, by the ungallant Jean de Meung. She is still as interesting to us by her character, her fate, and the influence of her spirit on her time, says Wieland in a little known essay,[10] as she once was to her contemporaries by her personal qualities and her works. In 1399 she wrote her Epistre au dieu d’Amours[11] (which for convenience of reference we call document I of the debate) which asks, why is it that women, formerly so esteemed and honored in France, are now attacked and insulted not only by the ignorant and base, but also by the educated, the noble, the priestly classes?
This poem naturally encountered opposition among the partisans of Jean de Meung, but Christine found powerful allies in Jean Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris, Guillaume de Tignonville,[12] Prévôt de Paris, and Marshal Boucicault.
The last named, indeed, who had just returned from his successful campaign in the East, founded in 1399 an order of knighthood expressly for the defence of women, called “l’écu verd à la dame blanche.”[13]
A little later, February 14, 1400, St. Valentine’s day, a number of great lords and poets assembled in the hôtel of the Duc de Bourgogne in Paris and founded an extensive organisation called the “Cour Amoureuse,”[14] to honor ladies and cultivate poetry. All classes of society were represented in the six hundred members whose names have come down to us.[15] We are perhaps especially interested in noticing the names of Gontier Col, and his brother Pierre Col, probably the foremost disciples (with Jean de Montreuil) of Jean de Meung.
One year to the day after the formation of the “Cour Amoureuse,” Christine de Pisan wrote her Dit de la Rose[16] (document II). In this she seems to be conscious (probably from support given her by the “Cour Amoureuse” and by the queen) of having an established position as a defender of her sex.
The controversy seems to have commenced,[17] as was very natural considering the circumstances, with oral discussions between Christine de Pizan, Jean de Montreuil,[18] and a third person, probably Gerson.[19] Then Jean de Montreuil, wishing to convince Christine and the third person before mentioned of the great value of the tenets of Jean de Meung expounded in the Roman de la Rose, wrote, probably in 1401, a treatise in the form of a letter (document III) now lost, which he sent to his two opponents.[20] This correspondence with Gerson (if it be he) is not improbable, as we have several other letters of Jean de Montreuil addressed to him.[21] We subjoin herewith also three undated Latin letters[22] from his pen, which bear on our subject.
Shortly afterward, Christine wrote a letter (document IV) to Jean de Montreuil (whom she calls “maistre Jehan Johannes”) refuting his arguments and again assailing the Roman de la Rose.
Gontier Col,[23] secrétaire du roi, having heard of this letter of Christine’s, sent her, in order to convince her of the unsoundness of her views regarding the poem, “un pou de trésor” (i.e., the work, Le trésor de Jean de Meung, ou les sept articles de la foi)[24] together with a request for a copy of her letter to Jean de Montreuil, in order that he might be informed concerning her point of view. This communication (document V) is dated September 13, 1401.
After his request had been promptly acceded to, Gontier Col hastened to write to Christine (document VI, September 15, 1401). This letter censures Christine sharply for her narrowmindedness regarding Jean de Meung’s great work, and rather brusquely calls upon her to retract her statements and sue for pardon.
Shortly afterward the authoress replied to this (in document VII). She now not only refuses to abandon in the slightest degree the position she had taken, but proceeds to adduce other reasons for condemning the poem and to repeat some arguments already brought forward.
Christine went further still. With an impulse born of clever feminine intuition, she assembled the documents of the debate and “la veille de la chandeleur 1401” addressed one copy, with a dedicatory letter (document VIII) to the queen, and the other, also with a letter introducing the subject (document IX), to Guillaume de Tignonville, prévôt of Paris. These two personages already favored her side of the case, and Christine’s appeal to Cæsar, as it were, was well calculated to prejudice further public opinion in her favor.
Doubtless Christine had already been confirmed in her attitude by the support of Jean Gerson. The latter had written in 1399 a Sermon contre la luxure, in one place in which, with all the authority he possessed, he condemned the Roman de la Rose to the fire: “Au feu, bonnes gens, au feu!... C’est le remède meilleur.” Gerson’s condemnation of the work was based on grounds somewhat different from those of Christine. He saw in it a work subversive of private and public morality. Although a humanist and a friend of humanists, he failed to see the real literary and philosophical merits of Jean de Meung’s work, and endeavored to use the great authority of the church to wipe it out of existence. On May 18, 1402, he wrote his Tractatus contra Romantium de Rosa,[25] which we reprint here (document X). This is cast in an allegorical mould, in the form of a “vision”—if he thought at all that he was borrowing a form of composition established by his opponents, he probably regarded it as fighting the devil with fire—and is a veritable procès-verbal against the romance. He divides his work into eight articles, and writes in a vivid, forceful, and conclusive style.
The quarrel seemed to be dying away, political events being presumably responsible,[26] when, four months later, Pierre Col[27] wrote a passionate letter (document XI) refuting both the Tractatus of Gerson and the letter of Christine to Jean de Montreuil. He sent copies to Gerson and Christine. With the appearance of Pierre Col the real position of the partisans of Jean de Meung becomes clear for the first time, and it is this part of the controversy which is particularly interesting to us now. Pierre Col undoubtedly recognized the lubricity of parts of the Romance, though he attempted to gloss it over. His share in the debate is virtually an eloquent defence of freedom of thought and liberty of expression, an attitude which links him with the representative writers and thinkers of France. Jean de Meung had dared to be free in thought and speech, and his great disciple ardently champions his right (and inferentially anyone’s right) to liberty in the intellectual and moral world, which France always has allowed more than other nations, and to which one eventful day she was to add political liberty. To him the Roman de la Rose was a precious public possession, and he was determined to keep it such.
We reprint herewith the eloquent reply of Gerson: Responsio ad scripta cujusdam errantis[28] (document XII) and publish for the first time that of Christine (document XIII) dated October 2, 1402, in which she adds no new arguments, though she reiterates and expands some already put forth, and confesses her weariness of an apparently endless struggle.
The indefatigable Pierre Col apparently did not intend to let the lady have the last word. Unconvinced by either the learned eloquence of Gerson or the feminine appeals of Christine, he concludes the controversy by a reply to Christine’s letter (the one dated October 2, 1402), of which only a short fragment has been preserved (document XIV).
This, briefly, is the general course of the debate, which we shall be satisfied to have outlined, preferring to let the documents speak for themselves rather than to attempt further analysis here.
NOTES
[1] Lavisse, Histoire de France, t. iv, p. 405.
[2] Cf. E. Langlois, Origines et Sources du Roman de la Rose, Paris, 1890, p. 130 sqq.
[3] Printed several times. Cf. Le Livre de Matheolus, poème français du XIVe siècle, par Jean le Fèvre, Brussels, A. Mertens et fils, 1864. M. A. Piaget quotes from the edition of Ol. Arnoullet, Lyons (Bib. Nat. Rés. Y, 4420). For a critical edition of both Latin and French texts cf. A. G. Van Hamel, Les Lamentations de Matheolus et le Livre de Leesce de Jehan le Fèvre, Paris, 1892-1905. Cf. also Ch.-V. Langlois, La Vie en France au moyen-âge d’après quelques moralistes du temps, Paris, 1908, and Ed. Tricotel’s analysis in the Bulletin du Bibliophile 32e année, 1866, pp. 552 sqq. I have not been able to consult V.-J. Vaillant, Maistre Mahieu, satirique boulonnais du XIIIe siècle.
[4] Ed. Michel LeNoir, Paris, 1518 (Bib. Nat. Rés. Y. 4421).
[5] Cf. La Cité des Dames, as yet unpublished.
[6] Called the Roman de Fauvel et Fortune, dated 1314. Bib. nat. fr. 571. Published at St. Petersburg, 1888, by A. Bobrinsky and Th. Batiouchkof. Cf. C.-V. Langlois, op. cit., p. 277 sqq.
[7] Poésies de Gilles li Muisis, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, Louvain, 1882. The Registre was written probably in 1350.
[8] Cf. Oeuvres complètes d’Eustache Deschamps, pub. by the Marquis de Queux de Saint Hilaire and Gaston Raynaud, Paris, 1878-1903.
[9] The same story is told of Guilhem de Bergedam, a Provençal poet who lived before Jean de Meung. Cf. F. Michel, Roman de la Rose, t. I., p. xv-xvi, and M. Méon, Roman de la Rose, t. II, p. 230 note.
[10] Ueber Christine von Pisan und ihre Schriften, in Der Teutsche Merkur, 1781, pp. 200-229.
[11] Ed. M. Roy, Oeuvres poétiques de Christine de Pisan (in Soc. des anc. textes franç.) t. II., p. 1 sqq.
[12] Counsellor and Chamberlain of Charles VI.—then prévôt of the City of Paris, 1401-1408—afterwards président de la chambre des comptes until his death (1414)—widely known on account of his execution of two clerks of the Université, guilty of assassination, whom he had hanged at night by torchlight and left attached to the gibbet for four months, when they were cut down and buried by Pierre des Essars (a creature of the duc de Bourgogne), who thus was able to infringe the commission of full power given Guillaume de Tignonville, June 21, 1401—of noble lineage, wise, a fine orator, and highly esteemed by the king—the translator, before becoming prévôt of Paris, of the Dicta Philosophorum under the title Livre des Philosophes. (Cf. P. Paris, Manuscrits français, IV., pp. 92-97, 173.)
[13] Cf. M. Roy, Oeuvres poétiques de Christine de Pisan (in the Soc. des anc. textes franç.) t. II., p. IV.
[14] Cf. A. Piaget in Romania, XX, pp. 417-454.
[15] Cf. Mss. 5233 and 10469, Bib. nat. fr.
[16] Ed. by F. Heuckenkamp, Halle, 1891, and by M. Roy, op. cit., II. p. 29 sqq.
[17] Cf. for chronology of the letters A. Piaget in Etudes romanes dédiées à Gaston Paris, 1891, pp. 113-120.
[18] Jean de Montreuil (called maistre Jehan Johannes by Christine de Pizan), diplomat and secrétaire du roi, was one of the leading humanists of his time, and numbered among his friends many famous men. Cf. A. Thomas, De Joannis de Monsterolio vita et operibus, Paris, 1883, p. 1: “ut Petro de Alliaco, Joanni Gersoni, Nicolao de Clamengiis, sed etiam italicis, ut Colutio Florentino Leonardoque Aretino amicitia conjunctus est.” He studied at the University of Paris, though he did not attend lectures there by Gontier Col, whom he elsewhere calls his “praeceptorem.” He seems to have abandoned the church, for which he was originally intended, and to have gone into public life. In 1391 we find him secretary to Charles VI, and also to the duc de Bourgogne and the duc d’Orléans. He soon became chanoine de Rouen, and then prévôt de Lille, a title which he liked. He undertook many embassies for the king of France: to England and Scotland, 1394; to Germany and Italy; to Pope Benedict XIII. at Avignon, 1404; to Rome (Jean XXIII.), 1412 (where he learned to know Leonardo Bruni). In 1413 he went as ambassador of the king of France to the duc de Bourgogne. In the civil war he attached himself to the party of Orléans and refused to leave Paris, with the result that it cost him his life in the massacre, June 12, 1418, of the party of the Armagnacs, which effected for a long time a stifling of the first Renaissance.
From this we see that Jean de Montreuil was a man of action, but we know him also as a man of letters. He wrote De Gestis et factis memorabilibus Francorum, dedicated to Gerson, certain works in refutation of the claims of Edward III. to the French throne (circ. 1400), and a large number of letters. His latinity was above the average of his time, but he tried to treat Latin like a living language, i.e., as a means of expression for all his ideas.
He was charged with paganism because he inscribed the ten laws of Lycurgus on the portico of his house, and confessed that he preferred them to evangelical principles. This is in the spirit of the real Renaissance, divided between faith and reason. This dilemma, whatever may be said, separates the Middle Ages from the Renaissance, since each age gives a different answer to the question. Jean de Montreuil is already abandoning the ideas of the Middle Ages and recommending those of the Renaissance. Therefore in his way he is an innovator and a precursor of the new time. His attitude in this matter is inseparably connected with the quarrel concerning the Roman de la Rose which, while it is a most ancient literary quarrel, is really moral and religious in nature. (Cf. Lavisse, Histoire de France, 1908, t. IV. (A. Coville), and A. Thomas, op. cit.)
[19] Cf. [document XI].
[20] Cf. A. Thomas, op. cit., p. 41-2.
[21] Ibid., p. 38.
[22] v. [Appendix].
[23] For a brief sketch of the life of Gontier Col, cf. M. Roy, Oeuvres poétiques de Christine de Pisan, t. II., pp. V-VI.
[24] Cf. M. Méon, Roman de la Rose, t. III., p. 331 sqq.
[25] Cf. also Bib. nat. fr. 1563, fol. 180 a. sqq.
[26] The policy of the duc d’Orléans was opposed to that of the duc de Bourgogne not only in France, but also with regard to the empire as a whole. He took the side of Wenceslas, rival for the crown of the empire of Robert of Bavaria. He used this position to repair his losses in Italy by acquiring possessions and position elsewhere, and succeeded so well that he was able in 1402 to occupy part of Luxembourg. The danger of this new power became so great that in December 1402, the diet of Spires discussed means of minimizing it. (Cf. Lavisse, Histoire de France, t. IV., p. 327-8).
Then also the whole of Christendom was split in two by the great schism in the church. As if strife in the empire and within France itself were not sufficient, there was added the intrigues of two rival popes. The University of Paris intervened in the struggle, and we can imagine Gerson’s activity commencing with his famous address of January 6, 1391.
In the struggle, in which so many differing interests were concerned, we can easily surmise the interest of Christine de Pizan with her whole being directed towards national unity, and of Gontier and Pierre Col with their political and ecclesiastic affiliations.
[27] Pierre Col, brother of Gontier Col, chanoine de Paris et de Tournai. Cf. a letter of Nicolas de Clémanges to Gontier Col in Nic. de Clém. ed. Lydius, p. 307, Epist. cx.: “Ad Guntherum Colli, De Germani sui sospitate et reditu ex peregrinatione, gratulatio.”
[28] Cf. Anvers edition, 1706, Vol. III, col. 293 sqq.