Reporter | Forest people
Edit | Yellow Moon
Love is an eternal topic. Throughout the ages, countless people have not been saddened by love, and they have been ecstatic in order to win the favor of their sweetheart. Guides to teaching people how to love abounded, and for 250 years from the late 13th century to the early 16th century, the must-read "love guide" for medieval Europeans, from learned doctors to ordinary citizens, was Roman de la rose. The great success of this elegant literature and allegory is that it is often compared to Dante's Divine Comedy.
The Legend of the Rose is a French-language poem by two authors, the poet Guillaume de Lorris, which was continued by university teacher Jean de Meun forty years after his death. According to French paleography scholars and archivists Nathalie Coilly and Marie-Hélène Tesnière, the work was born in the dual literary tradition that characterized Parisian society in the second half of the 13th century: it is written in poetry, in the Romance language (a language of Latin origin and spread in northern France), and its theme "In Search of Love" is inspired by the bards of southern France who sing elegant love.
Completed around 1280, The Legend of the Rose was continuously printed from the end of the 13th century to the 30s of the 16th century, and its popularity reached its peak in the 14th century. Although after the Renaissance people began to lose interest in it, by the time of Louis XIV (1661-1715) it was no longer regarded as a literary work and a collectible, but from the 18th century to modern times, the Legend of the Rose gradually became the object of scholarly study and is still one of the most famous texts in French medieval culture, along with The Legend of Lena and Arthur.
From the perspective of people now, "The Legend of the Rose" is a guide to dissect the steps of "chasing love" from a male perspective. The "beautiful" arrow that "love" fires at the admirer, first hitting the eye and then reaching the heart; "Wealth" is a good helper for "love", but at the same time it guards the path of "overgiving", and "poverty" guards the exit of the path... "The Legend of the Rose" tells the "art of love" in an anthropomorphic way, and some of the insights will make contemporary people laugh.
The Legend of the Rose: The Art of Medieval Love
[fr] Natalie Koye [fr] Marie-Elena Tenier et al., translated by Dong Ziyun and Lu Shanshan
Xinmin said | Guangxi Normal University Press, 2023-1
The battle of love in "The Legend of the Roses"
As a widely circulated literary work, "The Legend of the Rose" has aroused many discussions and analyses. Tenier points out that The Legend of the Rose has at least a triple reading of morality, spirituality, and lust, and that it is only in the literal sense of the war between "forces in favor of love" and "hostile forces of love", "which are first and foremost values or social situations consistent with or contrary to the elegant order of love." ”
Guillaume de Loris is considered the author of the first 4,000 lines of The Legend of the Roses, which laid out a narrative framework for the work that easily reminiscent of the elegant love of knights and noblewomen. The story begins in a dream of the narrator: in which the narrator is in spring, which is both the season of natural awakening and the season of love. The narrator leaves the city and strolls along a river to the outside of an orchard surrounded by high walls. Ten daunting, "painful and sad" portraits of women carved into the walls: "resentment", "betrayal", "meanness", "greed", "miserliness", "red eyes", "sadness", "aging", "hypocrisy" and "poverty". A beautiful blonde woman stands "idle" at the entrance of the orchard and tells the narrator that the place is called "Pleasure", that the high walls are dominated by the values of elegant love, and the outer walls are anthropomorphic figures of various sins.
A border of rose branches surrounds the first page of a manuscript of The Legend of the Rose
"Idleness" leads the narrator into the orchard. A group of people are dancing in a beautiful orchard, representing ten elegant love values: "joy", "elegance", "joy", "love" and inseparable from him, "softness", "beauty", "wealth", "generosity", "nobility" and "youth". The narrator leaves the crowd and approaches a sip of spring water, followed by "Love" and "Softness." The narrator learns that the beautiful boy Naxos, who is fascinated by his reflection in the water, died here. He caught a glimpse of the reflection of a cluster of roses in the spring water, at which point "Love" fired five arrows at him named "Beautiful", "Simple", "Noble", "Companionship" and "Kindness". These arrows first hit the eye and then reach the heart. These wounds make the narrator irrepressibly fall in love with a rose bud he sees in the spring, and he becomes a vassal "admirer" of "love", obeying him.
The narrator then embarks on a journey of love. Roses are watched over by "danger" (i.e., resistance), "bad mouth" (i.e., rumors), "shame" and "fear". The "admirer" is guided by the "warmth" (the nature of a beautiful girl to trust others) that encourages him despite hesitation, and with the advice of his "friend" and the support of Venus, he allows his desire to kiss his lover. His audacity was immediately punished by "possession" (i.e., the obstruction of social ethics). "Possession" builds a fortress around the rose bush and imprisons the "Wen Cun" together.
Loris's narrative came to an abrupt end, and Merne continued to write nearly 18,000 lines to complete the long poem. Just as the last forty episodes of A Dream of the Red Mansion are often considered by readers to be very different from the first eighty, the sequel to The Legend of the Rose is also considered to introduce a new style. Keye argues that Moane, the author of The Legend of the Roses, left the category of elegant love and continued the 12th-century tradition of the "love guide" pioneered by Ovid's Ars amatoria, which saw love as a "siege technique" that could be taught. Of particular note are the images of "friend" and "old woman", representing male and female aides of secular love, whose words are incompatible with the values of elegant love described in the first half of The Legend of the Rose. "Their advice reveals the extent to which love relies on material details, just the right gifts, and postures that occupy the high ground." As Moon prompts in the opening lines,
This is Ce est li romanz de la rose (Legend of the Rose),
It includes the art of love (Ou l'art d'amours est toute enclose).
In Moen's writing, several anthropomorphic figures take turns, one moment to persuade the "admirer" to regain his senses, the other to encourage him to continue his search for roses. "Friends" encourage "admirers" to use cunning, lies and bribery, believing that they are the safest way to attack a woman. The "friend" explained this as a woman's playfulness, mercenary, and dynasty—a cliché against women in classical times and the Middle Ages. Then the "admirer" encounters "wealth", and she guards the entrance of a trail named "overgive", which is a shortcut to love, but very dangerous, because its exit is guarded by "poverty". But "admirers" with empty pockets ate the closed-door soup of "wealth".
At this time, "Love" gathered various vassals and prepared to besiege the castle "occupied". "Fortune" refused to join because the latter never made an effort to make herself rich and never tried to get close to her. But "love" does not approve of feelings bought with money, he tends to protect "admirers". The vassals persuaded "love" to include "sanctimonious" (i.e., hypocrisy) and "a serious book." "Sanctimonious" and "Serious" came to the "evil mouth", and "sanctimonious" confused the other party, demanding that the latter confess to him and take the opportunity to strangle him, cutting off the tongue of his ostomy industry, thus eliminating the most cunning enemy of love.
On the high tower of the castle, the "old woman" of the jailer "Wen Cun" appeared, and she conducted an emotional education for women for the young "Wen Cun": let others fall in love with herself, but do not move her heart; Sell yourself for a high price; Assure each lover that he loves only one of the other; Realize youth and beauty, and be good at obtaining benefits through them, lest the evening scene be desolate, and the "old woman" laments that this is her end... With the support of the "old woman", "Love" and its vassals stormed the castle and fought against the hostile forces of love. Eventually Venus sets the castle on fire, the "warmth" is released, and the rose returns to the arms of the "admirer". The dreamer wakes up.
Martín Lefrancand, The Guardian of the Noble Woman, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Codex No. 12476, p. 3 reverse
Love and marriage in medieval Europe
It can be seen that the narrative subject and object of "The Legend of the Rose" is male, and it describes the traditional love script of (active, strong) men conquering (passive, effeminate) women, in which misogynistic remarks are obvious, especially some of the statements of "friends" and "jealous" (the latter represents a husband who is jealous because of his wife's deviant behavior), such as:
Every woman is crushed (Toutes se font hurtebillier)
Every woman, present, future or past (Toutes estes, serez ou fustes),
Whether out of reality or will, it is a prostitute (De fait ou de voulenté, pustes)!
The Legend of the Roses also forms an interesting set of contrasts with the marriage instruction manuals popular in Europe in the 14th-16th centuries. Historian Stephanie Coontz found that most of these marriage instruction manuals taught wives to be faithful, industrious, and courteous, but few were written for husbands, and seemed more like horse training strategies than marriage guides—their goal was to give husbands better control over their wives so that they could not resist. They also remind us of the historical fact that love may have been fascinating to medieval Europeans, but love and marriage are two different things, and "marriage for love" is almost unthinkable.
Take medieval aristocratic marriages, for example. In his book Marriage for Love: Marriage and Love's Past and Present, Kuntz argues that until the 18th century, the institution of marriage in which political and economic interests necessitated was a common form. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, Europe was once again broken up into a large number of small states, and the politics of marriage became important again—nobles or rulers consolidated or expanded their power through in-laws. In fact, the frequent or easy change of wives by aristocrats and rulers, which often led to bloody struggles for inheritance and increased competition between political rivals, made the promotion of Christianity more attractive, as Christianity prohibited polygamy and severely restricted divorce and remarriage. Kuntz humorously writes that the church's insistence on monogamy and opposition to divorce would cause some trouble, but "the benefits might amount to a military arms limitation treaty."
Marriage for Love: Marriage and Love's Past and Present
By Stephanie Kuntz, translated by Liu Junyu
CITIC Publishing Group 2020-03
It is worth noting that despite being constrained by patriarchy, European aristocratic women still had space to distribute social status and wealth autonomously in the Middle Ages. Women in medieval Europe could inherit property and pass on blood, and her property could not be taken and usurped by her husband or his relatives. For example, when Eleanor of Aquitaine married King Louis VII of France, her dowry was worth the equivalent of two French kingdoms, and when she left Louis VII, she also took her territory with her. Many queens or countesses established extensive networks of personal power in their husbands' court, and if she gave birth to an heir, his husband had to weigh her wishes. As the power of the Catholic Church grew, the independence and status of aristocratic women became increasingly restricted. After the 12th century, the establishment of the "primogeniture" system made it increasingly difficult for women to become heirs. But some savvy ladies can still find ways to exert their influence, such as using religious donations to establish their own network of patrons in the church, or simply establishing monasteries on ancestral lands to prepare for future divorces.
In the 15th century, a "fanwork" of the Legend of the Rose appeared, The Book of Love Chess. The book brings the content of The Legend of the Rose to a chessboard, with each piece named after a certain virtue or character in The Legend of the Rose, with the girl and her admirer playing against each other. After more than thirty moves, the girl used the army ("gentle") to defeat the admirer, and on the real chess board, the most powerful piece was the "queen" - when medieval Europeans introduced the chess game from the Islamic world, they renamed the "prime minister" or "national division" with "queen". In Kuntz's view, this may be due to the consensus in medieval Europe that "queens are not only valuable trophies in the game of marriage politics, they often become players with good records in their own right." ”
The allegorical chessboard in The Book of Love Chess
And what about the other 95% of medieval marriages – commoners – were married? Their marriage certainly does not involve national interests and power struggles, but it is equally crucial to the family's prospects. In medieval Europe, it was difficult for a person to survive independently, and it was necessary to create a viable family economic unit through marriage. A farmer not only wants to get married, but also cares about whether his neighbors can find a suitable spouse, because the topography of village life and farming makes marriage a public affair, and the well-being of the entire village depends on the formation of a network of neighbors who help each other and share responsibilities. To this end, villagers even prevent or punish marriages they deem unsuitable and perform humiliation ceremonies on nasty, misfit couples. Marriage, rather than having children, marked the formal adulthood of men and women in peasant society. The same is true for city dwellers, where marriage is usually a business partnership that benefits both relatives and friends. For men, marriage means financial independence – they marry after inheriting land or their father's craft.
For women, marriage helps them gain economic security and social status, but also deprives them of their independent legal status. Married women lost the right to deal with land, court, or private affairs, and the husband controlled all household resources, including the income generated by the wife, and could "discipline" his wife by force if necessary. The power of husbands can be seen in the laws of England, Normandy, and Sicily, which made the murder of her husband a crime of treason punishable by burning at the stake. Nevertheless, married women in the cities could petition the government to lift restrictions on married women, known as "feme soles" in England and France, and "marktfrau" in Germany, and were allowed to do business without their husbands' consent. The vast majority of independent wives are small-scale businesses, such as selling food and goods or brewing beer. This allowed the Middle Ages to witness the emergence of some female business wizards.
In any case, medieval Europeans understood that marriage would be the most important "vocational" decision of their lives, with many economic and social consequences for all social classes. "A pair of unswerving lovers who eventually escape the fate of being imprisoned by their parents and are willing to risk banishment by friends and family can force the disapproving Church to recognize their marriage. But things don't usually get to this point," Kuntz writes, "and it's widely believed that it's foolish to make such a big decision entirely on your own." ”
From the perspective of later historical generations, the drama of love offensive and defensive warfare may be played out in every era, but we are more fortunate than medieval Europeans that love does not have to stay in dreams or fantasies, love does not necessarily need to be separated from marriage, and women and men have become more balanced opponents of power on the chessboard of love. When individuals can enjoy more equality and freedom, is the elegant love described in "The Legend of the Rose" more accessible?
(Image provided by the publisher and licensed to use)
Resources:
[fr] Natalie Koye. [fr] Marie-Elena Tenier et al. The Legend of the Roses: The Art of Love in the Middle Ages. Guangxi Normal University Press.2023.
Stephanie Kuntz. "Marriage for Love: Marriage and Love's Past and Present". CITIC Publishing Group.2020.