Everything is coming up roses.

I write the blog Floriography for the ecommerce site birthdayblossoms.com.  It will not surprise you to know that the subject of most of my posts is flowers, and when it isn’t flowers specifically, it is generally botanical in nature. But I do manage to work in books, mostly because I can’t resist. I love literature too much to not talk about it, even when I am talking about flowers. June’s birth month flower is the rose, so that was the subject of my most recent post. I talked about the significance of the rose in different cultural situations, focusing on the association of the rose with love and romance in Western culture. Following is one example that I used.

The association of the rose with chivalry, and its manifestation in courtly romance, abounded in medieval culture. For example, the medieval period was the age of the troubadours, poet-musicians who entertained southern France and northern Italy by composing and performing poems which exclaimed chivalry and romance. (Hard to believe, but poetry was a significant form of entertainment.) Many of these poems featured roses, including one of the most popular, the Roman de la Rose/Romance of the Rose, written in the 13^th century. The term “roman” was not used because the poem was romantic, but rather because of the language in which it was composed. The term referred to any work that was written in early French, which, as a legacy of the Roman Empire, was called “roman.” Eventually, certain concepts or sentiments that were featured in French romans came to be called “romantic.” Nonetheless, romance as we understand it is front and center in the poem.

Roman de la Rose was written by two poets. The original poet was Guillaume de Lorris/William of the Loire, a scholar from Orleans. He composed an allegorical poem in rhyming couplets designed to encompass the art of courtly love, and to be a model of romance. In the poem, the narrator dreams he is in a Garden of Love. In this garden every known flower blooms, birds sing, and couples who personify the gallant life – Mirth, Gladness, Courtesy, Beauty – dance. The dreamer sees a rose lovelier than all the beauty which surrounds it, guarded by a thousand thorns. The rose is a symbol of the narrator’s Beloved and his longing to pick the rose is an allegory of the amorous arts.

Guillaume died before he finished the poem. Forty years later, another Frenchman, Jean de Meung, picked it up and completed it with thousands of lines that were very different from the verse of Guillaume. During the forty-year gap the age of satire had begun. The zeitgeist of medieval culture shifted from romance to reason, resulting in a tone quite distinct from the original portion of the poem. Jean de Meung did nod to the romantic intent by consenting to a happy ending to the poem, when the God of Love storms the tower where Danger, Shame, and Fear guard the Rose. Welcome admits the narrator to the inner shrine and lets him pluck the rose.

Roman de la Rose was one of the three most widely read books in Western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, suggesting that love was as popular then as it is now. Many things have changed since the Middle Ages, but romance keeps kicking.

I loved writing this post, and the positive response I got inspired me to work on some other crossover ideas I have. Stay tuned.