The Romance of the Rose, an allegorical dream-vision poem stemming from the troubadour tradition of courtly love and written in medieval French, was perhaps the most widely read book in 14th- and 15th-century Europe. During the century of high scholasticism (the 13th), this most influential of all works of medieval romance emerged. It was composed in two stages. Around 1230, Guillaume de Lorris came out with the first 4,058 lines, without quite finishing it. Around 1275 (the year after the death of both Aquinas and Bonaventure), Jean de Meun, a very different personality who studied at the University of Paris and who warred against the mendicant orders, produced a massive amplification of Guillaume’s work, adding 17,724 lines, shifting towards the encyclopedic and dialectic, changing its character from earnest to satiric.

C. S. Lewis’s scholarly work The Allegory of Love helped to revive modern interest in the work. Lewis argues for the realism of the allegorical method employed in The Romance: “[This method] was originally forced into existence by a profound moral revolution occurring in the latter days of paganism. For reasons of which we know nothing at all…, men’s gaze was turned inward. But a gaze so turned sees, not the compact ‘character’ of modern fiction, but the contending forces which cannot be described at all except by allegory.”