Medieval Authorship at Reason's End: The Roman de la Rose's Legacy of Misrule

This dissertation examines the authorial consequences of reason’s banishment. It addresses how medieval poets imagine their occupation when the faculty of mean, mediation, and measure is rendered suspect in relation to literary composition and reception. I argue that Guillaume de Lorris’s and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose initiates a literary tradition that understands reason to be in tension with and even antithetical to imaginative writing. The abandonment of rationality proffers the terms and concepts around which authors understand, structure, and represent their occupation. This largely unrecognized tradition of authorial misrule goes on to serve as a speculative domain for later Middle English authors. Poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, John Lydgate, and Thomas Hoccleve imitate, correct, and reimagine the narrative conditions and implications of Raison’s repudiation. These authors gain from the Rose’s irrationality a hermeneutic—a method of perception that goes on to shape representation—a topic—a collection of material and terms from which to draw both for literary theory and for literary practice—and a condition for writing—an anti-intellectual source that initiates invention. A writerly art based in misrule, rather than emerging as a broken creative system, ultimately enables medieval writers to recognize, accept, document, and value the morally questionable, the ephemeral, the earthly. Redefined as poetic virtue—as imaginatively productive and artistically challenging—misrule produces authors who see their work as a consequence and simulation of the transient, often rapturous pleasures of a mundane irrationality.