The ‘Roman de la Rose' and Thirteenth-Century Thought (Video)
- [Music]
- Hi, I'm Johnny Morton. I'm an Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Italian at Tulane
- University. And I'm going to talk to you for about 10 minutes about this, which is a book that I
- co-edited that came out in July of 2020 and it's called (I'll read you the title) it's The ‘Roman de la Rose'
- Thirteenth-Century Thought. So as you can probably work out I am a specialist in Medieval French
- literature. So the Roman de la Rose is French. It's a book, a very long poem, that was written in French
- in the 13th century, hence the title. And the Roman de la Rose means the Romance of the Rose. Now what
- a romance is, is not entirely clear in the 13th century. Now "roman" in modern French means a novel.
- In the 12th and 13th century, a "roman" particularly means something that is
- written in the French language as opposed to being written in Latin.
- It's more complicated than that but that's probably a good place to start. So what
- I'm really interested in my research, looking at literature written in French, is how it thinks;
- how it deals with ideas. This is particularly interesting, I think, because the main
- language in which people talk about science, or philosophy, or medicine, or law,
- or theology in the Middle Ages in Europe (the middle ages in western Europe) is in Latin.
- And so this is in French. Well this one actually- this book is written in English. But the book it's
- about, The Roman de la Rose, is written in French. And it's quite a weird book.
- What I'm gonna do is tell you a little bit about The Romance of the Rose and then a little bit
- about why I'm interested in it, and then a little bit about what's going on in this book. And I may
- finish with an attempt to persuade you to read this book but...
- what generally happens, actually, with books like this, this is a collection of essays, is
- that people might read one or two of the essays or maybe three or four. So you can always, if you
- go to the library, you can always take out this book, read an essay, take it out read a paragraph.
- I'm going to go and talk about medieval literature now. So I'll stop talking about my book
- and I'll talk about The Romance of the Rose. So it's a very, very weird text. The whole thing
- happens in a dream. We're told that the main speaker had a dream when he was younger and
- the whole dream turned out to be true, everything in it. And it's sort of a love story, but it's very
- surreal. So in it this guy has a dream, and in this dream he goes into this amazing garden and then he
- falls in love with the rose, not a woman but a rose. And so it's called The Romance of the Rose. And
- as he's looking at this rose he gets shot by Cupid, who is the god of love, who's not a cute
- baby but he's a kind of quite scary man with a great big bow and arrow. Who shoots him about
- 20 times and he falls in love with this rose and then he spends the whole poem trying to pluck it.
- Okay, so this is quite strange and it may be the reason why we give roses on Valentine's Day.
- Certainly before this text, the rose was a flower particularly associated with
- the Virgin Mary. That's the mother of Jesus in medieval theology. And after this book it
- became associated particularly with romantic love or particular parts of the female anatomy.
- And so that's already quite strange, right. We've got a dream about someone who wants to kiss a
- flower. The thing that's really weird about it is that this very long text, the story seems
- kind of simple but it's 22,000 verses of poetry. So in terms of a book it's probably about
- this thick. I don't have the book with me on hand to show you, otherwise I could show you exactly
- how big a poem it is. So the story is not that complicated but what there is in the story
- is a huge amount of philosophy, huge amount of different ideas. And what I've been interested in
- in my whole research career, not just about The Romance of the Rose, but particularly about it is
- why people bother putting ideas into literature. Why people bother putting ideas into poetry.
- And then what happens when you do put ideas into poetry
- or into fiction? How do you know if you don't say these ideas clearly in nice
- clear language. How do you know what the ideas really are? Now this is particularly true when
- this whole dream is allegorical. So the rose isn't really a rose. The rose is supposed
- to be a woman, but you're not quite sure who she is or if she's real. And this is true of
- the whole of the language of this text. It's that you're not sure how much to believe it.
- And this is particularly true of literary language and poetry. When one word can mean several
- things at the same time, which is nice if you want to play pretty games with words. But
- it's not so useful if you're trying to advance a scientific theory. Okay, so what's the point? Why
- put so much philosophy into this text? And that is the question that motivated my first book, which is
- not this one. It's a different one it came out in 2018 and it's called (I know this one) it's called...
- The Romance of the Rose in its Philosophical Context or The Roman de la rose in its Philosophical
- Context: Art, Nature, and Ethics. So those are the questions that I'm particularly interested in.
- What is art? What is nature? How they thought through in a poem, which is very artificial. How
- does an artificial thing think about nature? And things like that. So my work is quite philosophical,
- although I'm not a philosopher. So one of the- another thing I should say about the Romance of
- the Rose is that it is one of the most important pieces of literature in the Middle Ages in Europe.
- Potentially one of the most important works of literature in the European tradition, even though
- it's not that well read anymore. Because it's in part, it's so weird and it's quite difficult.
- So in the Middle Ages it was incredibly popular. There was only one book in the vernacular, not
- in Latin, that was copied more and that's Dante's Divine Comedy. And so this is a very important book.
- And it has- the way that it does philosophy is radical, it's new, and it's very influential. Not
- least on poets like Geoffrey Chaucer and Dante as well, actually, and Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and
- other Italians too, and pretty much anyone writing in French for the next two or three hundred years.
- So this book is finished in about 1278 thereabouts, maybe 1280. And so
- this is a question, like I said. The question I'm interested in is why people, why the authors (and
- there were two authors) would want- so I'm going to start that bit again. So the question, the
- question that I'm particularly interested in is why the two authors of the Romance of the
- Rose, and there are two, they didn't know each other. One of them left it unfinished and the
- other one continued it. The question is why did they bother putting all of these ideas in it.
- And how do we work out what those ideas are. So I had a go at answering this question
- in a book that came out two and a half years ago now. And then I thought with my colleague, I put
- this particular this conference together with a a good friend and colleague of mine called Marco
- Nievergelt and along with another colleague who's in philosophy called John Marenbon. They're
- both wonderful. If you ever come across anything either of them have written I recommend it.
- So Marco especially and I thought, why don't we get together a load of specialists in
- philosophy and make them read the weird book of poetry and see what they make of it.
- And that's what happened. So in 2016 we organized a small conference in Paris.
- And we brought together a series of historians of philosophy, and historians of
- medicine, and specialists in literature to read the book together and talk about it. And that's
- how we ended up with a collection in here. So I can- I'll just very quickly- I'm gonna hold up
- the- if you're interested I'm gonna hold up the titles of the books
- But do you know what? There's a website- you can even just- you can look it up on
- the website. If you go to the website of the publishers called Cambridge University Press.
- And if you go to their website and you can look up this book and see what's in it.
- But I can just- I'll quickly run you through. I'm going to stop talking fairly soon. I'm going to
- quickly run you through the kinds of things that we were thinking about. So for my part, I wrote an
- essay about sophisms and sophistry. So sophistry is kind of fake philosophy. And it gets talked
- about in Plato. In ancient Greek philosophy the sophists are kind of the enemy of the philosophers.
- And Aristotle also talks about sophists as people who are fake philosophers.
- And so I'm interested in how poetry is kind of fake philosophy. And what you have to do
- to make sense of that fakeness. And how you nonetheless can get something useful from it.
- So that was my one. Another colleague wrote about law and legal theory. And looked at how
- the poem dealt with questions, quite detailed questions,
- that were discussed in legal philosophy in the 13th century. Another person wrote a piece about
- the terminology of psychology and the imagination. And how this poem is used to think about thinking.
- Someone else, another philosopher, wrote an essay about what belief is and how that is-
- that philosophy is expressed in the Romance of the Rose. And so essentially what I'm hoping- so
- what I'm hoping essentially is that people who later come and study this text
- will now have to take seriously just how much philosophy there is in it. And this book is going
- to be a very useful resource for people who may not be experts in philosophy or may not be experts
- in french poetry but are interested in one of them. And this will help them think about it more.
- What I might do just quickly, this might get cut. Again I don't know. This might not make
- the final cut. I want to just quickly talk to you about the cover image. So this is from
- a 14th century manuscript of The Rose. And the manuscripts are often beautifully decorated. And
- this is a figure called Genius, who is disguised as a bishop. He's dressed up like a bishop. And this
- is where you can see the the fakeness. He's not really a bishop but he looks like one. And he's
- giving a lecture to- this is the army of the god of love, who are going to help the central character,
- he's called the lover, get to the rose. And what he's reading out is a sermon that basically says
- that people should try and have as much sex as they can in order to get into heaven. That's not
- the only thing he says, but it's one of the things that he says because Genius,
- he's not a real bishop. He represents, among other things, the principle of the continuing the species.
- So he wants people to have as much hetero sex as possible. He also gets himself sidetracked and
- he goes off in a very very homophobic rant. He's very not okay with queer sex or non-reproductive sex.
- And so you have- this kind of illustrates- you have what looks like a teaching scenario. This
- looks like the transmission of knowledge. And what you have in it is slightly absurd.
- So then you have to make sense of that. You have to make sense of the absurdity.
- And you have to make sense of how it is that you can learn from people even when 50 percent of what
- they say is nonsense. And sometimes I like to think that that is the kind of problem
- that students in my classes have to deal with. Where sometimes I will say things that will be
- useful and sometimes I will say things that are maybe less useful. And I think students,
- if they take one thing from this video, should be that they should always come to class prepared to
- think critically about what their teachers tell them. And that's, I think,
- what this book is about ultimately. And on that I'm going to stop and I encourage
- you all to make the most of the library and especially to look at this book in it.
- [Music]