Afterlives of the Roman de la rose, between England and France

The thirteenth-century love allegory the Roman de la rose was among the most popular vernacular poems of late medieval Europe, and it had a profound effect on English poetry in the fourteenth century. Cited, imitated, and transformed by a host of English poets, it has a central and under-estimated place in the literary history of England. This paper sketches one trajectory followed by the Rose in England, arguing that developments in its English history cannot be divorced from a sensitivity to larger, pan-European patterns. Focusing on the conflicted position of the Rose in courtly encounters with the text, I offer some new ways of thinking about the reception of this text, and trace the complex interactions between text and reader that emerge in the afterlives of the Roman de la rose, between England and France.