Jean de meun biography of william

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French poet who owes his celebrity to his continuation of the Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Saint-Amour. De Meung also wrote a rhyming treatise on alchemy. He appears to have possessed a light and railing wit and a keen appreciation of a jest, and it may well be doubted whether he was altogether sincere in his praises of alchemy. The poet composed a strongly stigmatic quatrain on womankind and the ladies of Charles IV's court resolved to revenge their affronted honor.

Surrounding him in the royal antechamber, they ordered the courtiers present to strip de Meung before they gave him a sound flogging. Jean begged to be heard before he was condemned and punished. Having obtained an interval of grace, the poet admitted — with fluent eloquence — that he was certainly the author of the calumnious verses, but that they were not intended to disparage all women.

He referred only to the vicious and debased, he insisted, and not to such models of purity as he saw around him. Nevertheless, if any lady present felt that the verses really applied to her, he would submit to a well-deserved chastisement! None, of course, accepted. Like most of the medieval poets, Jean de Meung was a bitter enemy of the priesthood, and he contrived with great ingenuity a posthumous satire upon their inordinate greed.

He bequeathed in his will, as a gift to the Cordeliers friars , a chest of immense weight. Since his fame as an alchemist was widespread, the brotherhood accepted the legacy in the belief that the chest contained the golden results of his quest for the philosophers' stone. But when they opened it, their dismayed eyes rested only on a pile of slates covered with the most unintelligible hieroglyphics and kabalistic characters.

The perpetrator of this practical joke was hardly, it seems, a sincere believer in the wonders of alchemy. Jean de Meun embodied the mocking, sceptical spirit of the fabliaux. He did not share in current superstitions, he had no respect for established institutions, and he scorned the conventions of feudalism and romance. His poem shows in the highest degree, in spite of the looseness of its plan, the faculty of keen observation, of lucid reasoning and exposition, and it entitles him to be considered the greatest of French medieval poets.

He handled the French language with an ease and precision unknown to his predecessors, and the length of his poem was no bar to its popularity in the 13th and 14th centuries.

Jean de meun biography of william

Part of its vogue was no doubt due to the fact that the author, who had mastered practically all the scientific and literary knowledge of his contemporaries in France, had found room in his poem for a great amount of useful information and for numerous citations from classical authors. The book was attacked by Guillaume de Degulleville in his Pelerinage de la vie humaine c.

He died in a comfortable house near the University of Paris, where he may have had some academic connection. In Jean's continuation of the Romance of the Rose, Reason tries to dissuade the lover, but the god of Love later reproaches the lover for lending an ear to Reason. In the course of the lover's turmoil he has occasion to reflect, among other things, that possessions are burdens, that charity and justice are by no means equal, that power and virtue never go together, and that, even in destroying, Nature carries on her struggle against death.

It also found energetic defenders. The whole poem was translated into Modern English verse by F. Ellis [ 3 ] and later by Charles Dahlberg. His last poems are doubtless his Testament and Codicille. The Testament is written in quatrains in monorhyme , and contains advice to the different classes of the community. Contents move to sidebar hide.

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