The Roman de la rose in its Philosophical Context: Art, Nature, and Ethics

This book studies one of the most important works of medieval literature to show how poetry can be philosophical in the Middle Ages and how philosophy can take the form of poetry. It looks at the complex thirteenth-century Roman de la rose in the light of the philosophical ideas of its time and shows the range and scope of the poem’s dialogue with pressing philosophical questions at the time it was written. This study combines literary and philosophical analysis in an original way to offer a new understanding of the text’s key themes of art, nature, and ethics. The Rose had a huge influence over literary production across Europe for more than two hundred years after its composition and this study will be of value for all those studying European literature of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries.