Jean Molinet’s Burgundian Adaptation of the Most Influential Love Allegory of the Middle Ages
[Lorris, Guillaume de and Jean de Meung]. CEst le romant de la rose […] Translate de rime en prose / Par vostre humble molinet. Lyon, Guillaume Balsarin, 1503.
One of the great literary monuments of medieval France in its rare early Renaissance prose adaptation: the Roman de la Rose, translated from verse into prose by the Burgundian court poet Jean Molinet and printed in Lyon in 1503 with 140 woodcuts.
No secular French literary work shaped the imagination of the late Middle Ages more profoundly than the Roman de la Rose. At once dream vision, love allegory, philosophical satire, erotic narrative, and encyclopedic meditation on human desire, it remained continuously read, debated, imitated, and attacked for centuries. The present edition belongs to the moment when medieval courtly literature was being transformed for a new early modern readership around 1500.
Edition & Bibliographic Information
Small folio (approximately 285 × 197 mm), printed throughout in double columns.
Illustrated with a large opening woodcut, 138 text woodcuts, a large decorative initial to the prologue, numerous initials throughout, and the printer’s device of Guillaume Balsarin.
Bound in a modern dark brown calf binding executed in period style with blind tooling and Renaissance-inspired roll decoration. The copy preserves wide margins and remains nearly uncut, an especially rare survival for an illustrated vernacular romance of this period.
Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung
The Roman de la Rose was written in two radically different stages by two authors separated by roughly half a century.
Guillaume de Lorris began the poem around 1230 as a refined courtly allegory of love. The narrator enters the enclosed garden of desire, encounters personified virtues and vices, and becomes captivated by the Rose — the central symbol of idealized female beauty and erotic longing. Guillaume’s section still belongs fundamentally to the world of high medieval courtliness and troubadour culture.
Around 1280, Jean de Meung transformed the unfinished poem into something vastly larger, darker, and intellectually more unstable. His continuation expands into philosophical digressions, satire, misogyny, erotic comedy, social criticism, and reflections on fortune, money, hypocrisy, and power. The result became one of the defining literary works of late medieval Europe precisely because it refused any single stable interpretation.
The work survives as both celebration and destruction of courtly ideals. Love becomes at once spiritual aspiration, psychological obsession, social performance, and physical desire.
Jean Molinet and the Burgundian Court
The present edition contains the prose adaptation prepared around 1482 by Jean Molinet, official poet and chronicler at the Burgundian court.
Molinet dedicated the work to Philip of Cleves-Ravenstein, one of the most prominent Burgundian nobles of the age and a figure deeply entangled in the dynastic conflicts surrounding Mary of Burgundy and Maximilian I.
His adaptation did more than simply modernize the language. Molinet added moral and allegorical interpretations throughout, attempting to guide readers through the ambiguities and contradictions of the original text. Even so, modern scholarship has noted how closely his prose follows the medieval poem itself, preserving much of its psychological and narrative complexity.
The present Lyon edition of 1503 is only the second edition of Molinet’s adaptation, following Antoine Vérard’s Paris edition of 1500.
The Woodcuts and the Afterlife of Medieval Romance
The extraordinary cycle of 140 woodcuts derives from an earlier Lyonnais illustration tradition associated with the Roman de la Rose.
By 1503, the visual language of these images already appeared archaic. Perspective remains uncertain, gestures theatrical, and architectural spaces strangely flattened. Yet precisely this gives the edition much of its fascination. The images preserve the imaginative atmosphere of late medieval romance at the very moment Europe was entering the Renaissance.
The Roman de la Rose itself occupied a similarly transitional cultural position. It belonged to the fading world of chivalric and allegorical literature, yet its psychological ambiguity, irony, and instability continued to resonate deeply into the sixteenth century.
Provenance
Contemporary sepia annotations on the title and prologue pages, including the date “1507.” French private collection.
Literature
Baudrier XII, 41 and 60ff.; Bechtel M-440; Brunet III, 1176; Ebert 19322; Panzer VII, 279; Tchemerzine VII, 250; Vingtrinier 99.
For a fuller scholarly description and illustrations, see Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, number 33:
Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, Volume I
