The introduction gives an overview of the Rose’s engagement with thirteenth-century thought. It considers how the text’s game with the literal and allegorical senses of its words frustrate attempts to take unambiguous meaning from its poetry. It considers how the poem’s deliberate ambiguity responds to the context of its composition, both to the context of the University of Paris, racked by philosophical controversies in second half of the thirteen century, and to contemporary trends in satirical, philosophical poetry, strongly influenced by Roman poet Ovid, exemplified by the De amore of Andreas Capellanus. After a consideration of the Rose’s influence on later medieval poetry, the introduction gives an overview of the different chapters in the collection.

Jean’s Roman de la Rose is characterised by its intense interest in language, signification, and representation. Several elements of Jean’s linguistic speculation resonate with academic debates among contemporary grammarians and logicians at the University of Paris. The following developments appear to have had a particularly important impact upon Jean’s poem: the rapid rise of modistic grammar in the late 1260s; theories of “improper” expression; debates over the nature and stability of imposition; and the related debate over the problem of “empty reference”. Jean’s reflection on language, metaphor, and reference bears a striking affinity to the theories of signification formulated by intentionalist grammarians, particularly the controversial Roger Bacon. Following Bacon, Jean directly critiques a number of arguments advanced by the first-generation modistae or speculative grammarians, and finally reveals the basic premises of modistic grammar as a whole to be untenable. Elaborating the suggestions of intentionalist grammarians, Jean emphasises the contextual, fluctuating nature of language: signification itself is revealed to be a fundamentally interpretive, inferential process that eludes regulation. I suggest that rather than simply adopting Baconian ideas about language and signification, Jean employs the Rose as a testing ground to explore the extreme consequences and implications of Bacon’s unusual language theory.

Sir Cleges displays at least two major defining features of insular romance: it is a pious, moral tale, but is also marked by a concern with pragmatic matters, more specifically economic ones. Together with Sir Amadace and Sir Launfal, it belongs to a loosely defined group of romances that develop the motif of the ‘spendthrift knight’. The peculiar combination of piety and economics found in both Cleges and Amadace has proven rather baffling, and critics have frequently complained about the rather awkward yoking together of money and religion in these romances. Speaking of Amadace, for instance, Robert Foster points to the ‘ambiguous relation between idealism and materialism’, in a poem where ‘the situation is framed in such wholly economic terms that it is difficult to focus on the spiritual dimension that the poem's didactic intentions seem to call for’. It remains tempting to perform the usual secularising gesture, and argue that in such literature ‘there is a peculiar reduction of ideals to wealth’. In what follows I suggest that no such opposition or reduction of ‘ideals’ to ‘wealth’ is in fact discernible within such romances, where economics and salvation are articulated in far more complex, dynamic and meaningful ways that we have only begun to uncover.

An important step in this direction has already been taken by Ad Putter, with a brilliant reading of Sir Amadace, where he urges us to take the religious elements of such ‘bourgeois’ poems far more seriously, as integral components of the ideology they construct. Putter proposes something much more dynamic and more enabling than a didactic reading, and illustrates how in Amadace the notion of aristocratic largesse acquires a ‘religious remit’ and even a truly ‘metaphysical dimension’. This metaphysics of largesse develops around the central thematic and symbolic place of God in the narrative, presented as a dispenser of freely given divine grace and thus as the initiator of the economy of charitable gift-exchange celebrated in the poem. Often dismissed as a poem in which there is ‘little that is artful’, Sir Cleges constructs a similarly complex, subtle yet imaginatively powerful metaphysics of largesse. The poet pursues this objective in an unobtrusive, rhetorically economical yet remarkably self-conscious fashion. In what follows, then, I shall be arguing that the poem's symbolic, rhetorical, and material economies are interconnected in profound and complex ways, and produce a carefully and deliberately orchestrated ‘theological romance’.

Modern critics on the whole have found it rather difficult to account for the success of Guillaume de Deguileville's Pelerinage de Vie Humaine with medieval readers, and the poem is still widely misunderstood whenever it is not overlooked or dismissed out of hand. Things have begun to improve over the last decade, with the appearance of a number of studies on the circulation, translation, and reception of Deguileville. This is a welcome development, but it may also have distracted our attention from the internal workings of this influential, rich, and complex allegory, still insufficiently studied in terms of its place within multiple overlapping contexts – intellectual, literary, cultural, and political. The survival of two rather different versions of the poem, PVH1 from 1331, and PVH2 from 1355–6, further complicates the picture, but affords us the rare opportunity to trace the internal tensions, shifts, and transformations of an author's poetic vision over time.

The Pelerinage presents an account of the poet's ostensible dreamvision, and features a pilgrim- persona who is simultaneously dreamer, first- person narrator, protagonist, and expositor of his quest. This complex narrative configuration of the subject develops in the wake of the Roman de la Rose, Deguileville's declared model and evoked in the opening lines of his poem (PVH1, 7–11). Yet Deguileville's poem also seeks to harness the energies of first- person allegorical narrative to avowedly spiritual and salvific ends. The pilgrimage thus figures a complex pedagogical trajectory, and the reader is invited to identify with the pilgrim and participate actively in the learning process. Deguileville uses the Augustinian motif of the pilgrimage to figure the learning process of the Christian wayfarer, and indeed the poem as a whole develops an unmistakeably Augustinian/Platonist anthropology and epistemology. Augustine had developed the idea of the Christian life as a journey especially in his hugely popular De Doctrina Christiana, whose influence on Deguileville has already been suggested by other critics. In the De Doctrina the journey traces an itinerary of Christian learning that enables the individual pilgrim's ‘return’ to his heavenly home (De Doctrina 1. 4. 4; 1. 10. 10; 1. 18. 17), and pilgrimage here visualizes a transformation that is at once interpretive, pedagogical, ethical, cognitive, and ontological.