Abstract

In a fifty-two–line interpolation appearing towards the end of many Romance of the Rose manuscripts, the narrator compares the female image over the entry to the tower of Jealousy—the one at which Venus fires her burning arrow—to the head of Medusa. This passage entered the Rose manuscript tradition in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, possibly within the lifetime of Jean de Meun; it recurs throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. A reading of the Medusa interpolation raises the important critical issue of significant variants in a manuscript tradition and the evidence they offer for a medieval reading of the text in question. A close examination of the Medusa passage expands our understanding of the reception of the Rose during the twenty or thirty years immediately following the completion of Jean de Meun's continuation. An inquiry into the relevance of Medusa to the Rose, and in particular to this moment in the Rose, helps us to appreciate something of what the poem may have meant for its first readers. As I will show, the Medusa passage participates in a larger mythographic program extending throughout the conjoined Rose, exploring the nature of feminine sexuality and its effects on men