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The Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun (1225-45, continuation 1268-85) has seemingly always elicited dissension among its readers. Histories of critical responses to the Rose have demonstrated that, from at least the fourteenth century onward, the poem has served as a touchstone for a broad range of intellectual and political debates. The famous polemic known as the Querelle de la Rose (1401-1403), which pitted Christine de Pizan and Jean Gerson against Jean de Montreuil and Pierre and Gontier Col, is merely the most dramatic (and the most public) moment in an extensive and exceptionally complex Rezeptionsgeschichte. Certainly controversies over the literary, cultural, and historical significance of the Rose have not ended in the modern era. Just as medieval readers sought to appropriate and manipulate the text for a range of divergent purposes (poetic, erotic, moral, spiritual, and so on), so modern scholars have their own hermeneutical tendencies, [End Page 171] strategies, and biases. In the introduction to their indispensable Rethinking the "Romance of the Rose" (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot have identified at least three different "orientations" in twentieth-century Rose criticism: the "neo-patristic perspective" views the poem as a fictional encoding of Augustinian orthodoxy; the "philosophical perspective" interrogates links between the Rose and twelfth-century Neo-Platonists, especially the School of Chartres; and finally, a generalized "literary" perspective employs a variety of critical methodologies in order to probe the Rose's intricate rhetorical, poetic, narrative, and thematic structures (2). Though these rubrics are certainly helpful in synopsizing and appraising the critical tradition, they are almost necessarily reductive. No single orientation can be fully divorced from the others; indeed, widely divergent critical practices are subsumed under each of these categories, thus belying any notion of true critical consensus. Leaving aside the totalizing programmatic claims of scholars like D.W. Robertson and John Fleming, it is clear that the Roman de la Rose remains, and doubtless will always remain, one of the most equivocal, enigmatic, and controversial works of medieval vernacular literature.

In his virtuosic new study of Jean de Meun, Alastair Minnis makes no attempt to offer a fully integrated reading of the Rose or to bring about a resolution to critical conflict. Taking note of the ambivalent, contentious nature of the poem's reception history, Magister Amoris begins instead with the refreshing and wholly apposite claim that critical responses to an inherently unstable literary text are themselves inevitably unstable. Minnis cites, for the most part approvingly, recent critical work that sees the Rose as a deliberate—and perhaps also insurmountable—challenge to conventional thematic reading. With real brio and authority, he demonstrates that Jean's poem does indeed eschew typological meaning, validates semantic play, and experiments with and frustrates hermeneutical expectations. Jean de Meun, Minnis writes, "mixes together so many different matières, so many different genres (with all their various formulae, manoeuvres, and expectations), that no clear route through the text is visible or perhaps even possible" (25). And yet by no means does Minnis view Jean's poem as proliferating difference beyond intellectual, cultural, or sociological constraints; nor does he see the Roman de la Rose as a marginal text subversive of the cultural and ideological practices of its time. On the contrary, he systematically locates Jean de Meun within medieval clerical culture and the Rose itself within the specific aesthetic and hermeneutical tradition of "medieval Ovidianism." In the process, he significantly deepens and broadens our understanding of the historical, theoretical, and ideological implications [End Page 172] of the poem's numerous interpretive problems—not resolving them, but rediscovering their subtleties through rigorous contextualization.

I should note at the outset that the massiveness of Minnis's erudition makes the reviewer's task an exceedingly difficult one. I will try to use the space allotted me here to give a reasonably detailed account of the principal argument of Magister Amoris, as well as some of the more salient details...