Jean de Meun's continuation of Guillaume de Lorris's Roman de la Rose (a sequel containing questionable advice on love and a low opinion of women in general) was judged vulgar by contemporary critics. A literary debate developed in the early fifteenth century, a controversy which came to be known as the Querelle de la Rose. Although Christine de Pizan's and Jean Gerson's critiques of the romance and Jean de Montreuil’s, as well as Gontier and Pierre Col's defenses of De Meun have been well documented in recent years, the moralized version of the romance by the Rhétoriqueur poet and chronicler Jean Molinet, published in 1500, has received little critical attention. The rather copious work (153 folios as presented in the Balsarin Lyon edition) was misunderstood and deemed unworthy of study by various critics, and has not been published in a modern edition except for its appearance in an unpublished dissertation completed by Raymond Andes in 1948. My essay intends to demonstrate the outstanding value of Molinet's moralization.

In the preface to his edition, Andes asserts that Molinet's moralités appearing in his Roman de la Rose moralisé “lack cohesion, are absurd, and deserve the vicious criticism they have received” from such critics as Henry Guy and Pierre Champion (xxxii). The work, he adds, would only interest linguists who might find in it evidence of changes in Middle French, or those who might wish to study it for “archeological” reasons in order to gain “psychological insight [into] the heart and mind of a typical Rhétoriqueur” (xxxii– xxxiii). Some twenty years later, Rosemond Tuve also strongly criticized Molinet's “unsuccessful translation” (265) of the romance, his “bad allegory” (245), and his “dreadful flaw” of “shattering into fragments the unified work being allegorized.” She further accuses Molinet of “allegorizing a startling but moral work, mak[ing] of it a grossly immoral book” (245). Jean Dupire, Molinet's biographer and a much more sympathetic reader, could not deny the allegorical mess he found in the work; most of Molinet's comparisons, he writes, are “disconcerting and even extravagant” (101). Recently, Michael Randall has referred to Molinet's lack of “structural coherence” and his “often confusing … imagery” (Building, 13, 21).