The Romance of the rose

Helena Phillips-Robins discusses CUL MS Gg.4.6, displayed the exhibition 'The moving word: French medieval manuscripts in Cambridge', held in Cambridge University Library, 22 January-17 April 2014.

The Romance of the Rose was one of the best known, most admired and most imitated texts of the French Middle Ages. It is an allegorical love poem that is truly encyclopaedic in scope, telling the story of Amant (the Lover) who falls asleep and dreams that he enters a walled garden. In the same fountain in which Narcissus drowned himself he sees the reflection of a beautiful rosebud and is immediately inflamed by desire to possess it. A series of allegorical characters, from Fair Welcome to Reason to Foul Mouth, help and hinder him on his quest and he finally manages to pluck the rose in what is a violent, even rape-like sexual conquest.

While most medieval vernacular texts survive in a handful of manuscripts, the Rose is preserved in nearly three hundred. The one we are looking at here was produced in Paris in the 1330s. The miniatures are by Richard de Montbaston, who, together with his wife Jeanne, illustrated over 20 copies of the Rose. On the opening page of the text [f. 3], we see the Lover asleep, with the rosebush forming the backdrop to the scene. He then arises in his dream and comes across a high garden wall. His pointing finger and upturned gaze draw our eyes to the painted figures, which are supposed to represent various vices along with Sorrow, Old Age and Poverty.

The moment when the Lover actually enters the garden is depicted a few folios further on [f. 7v]. Idleness -- dressed in orange -- takes him by the hand, about to lead him through the archway. We have a great example of a later reader putting his stamp on the manuscript, as it were, for R. Smithe, a sixteenth-century English owner of the manuscript, has indulged in a little cross-cultural graffiti, writing his name on the garden wall.

The rubric (in red) just above the miniature reads 'Oyseuse' (Idleness). Rubrics were, of course, composed by copyists and while they are not actually part of the poem itself, they are an important part of the manuscript as a whole. Rubrics identifying who is speaking are a standard feature of Rose manuscripts and help to orient the reader among the poem's vast array of characters.