JEAN DE MEUN, or De Meung (c. 1250–c. 1305), whose original name was Jean Clopinel or Chopinel, was born at Meun-sur-Loire. Tradition asserts that he studied at the university of Paris. At any rate he was, like his contemporary, Rutebeuf, a defender of Guillaume de Saint-Amour and a bitter critic of the mendicant orders. Most of his life seems to have been spent in Paris, where he possessed, in the Rue Saint-Jacques, a house with a tower, court and garden, which was described in 1305 as the house of the late Jean de Meung, and was then bestowed by a certain Adam d’Andely on the Dominicans. Jean de Meun says that in his youth he composed songs that were sung in every public place and school in France. In the enumeration of his own works he places first his continuation of the Roman de la rose of Guillaume de Lorris (q.v.). The date of this second part is generally fixed between 1268 and 1285 by a reference in the poem to the death of Manfred and Conradin, executed (1268) by order of Charles of Anjou (d. 1285) who is described as the present king of Sicily. M. F. Guillon (Jean Clopinel, 1903), however, considering the poem primarily as a political satire, places it in the last five years of the 13th century. Jean de Meun doubtless edited the work of his predecessor, Guillaume de Lorris, before using it as the starting-point of his own vast poem, running to 19,000 lines. The continuation of Jean de Meun is a satire on the monastic orders, on celibacy, on the nobility, the papal see, the excessive pretensions of royalty, and especially on women and marriage. Guillaume had been the servant of love, and the exponent of the laws of “courtoisie”; Jean de Meun added an “art of love,” exposing with brutality the vices of women, their arts of deception, and the means by which men may outwit them. 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. 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 Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (c. 1330), long a favourite work both in England and France; by John Gerson, and by Christine de Pisan in her Épître au dieu d’amour; but it also found energetic defenders.
Jean de Meun translated in 1284 the treatise, De re militari, of Vegetius into French as Le livre de Vegèce de l’art de chevalerie[1] (ed. Ulysse Robert, Soc. des anciens textes fr., 1897). He also produced a spirited version, the first in French, of the letters of Abelard and Hèloïse. A 14th-century MS. of this translation in the Bibliothèque Nationale has annotations by Petrarch. His translation of the De consolatione philosophiae of Boëtius is preceded by a letter to Philip IV. in which he enumerates his earlier works, two of which are lost—De spirituelle amitié from the De spirituali amicitia of Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1166), and the Livre des merveilles d’Hirlande from the Topographia Hibernica, or De Mirabilibus Hiberniae of Giraldus Cambrensis (Giraud de Barry). His last poems are doubtless his Testament and Codicille. The Testament is written in quatrains in monorime, and contains advice to the different classes of the community.
See also Paulin Paris in Hist. lit. de la France, xxviii. 391–439, and E. Langlois in Hist. de la langue et de la lit. française, ed. L. Petit de Julleville, ii. 125–161 (1896); and editions of the Roman de la rose (q.v.).
- ↑ Jean de Meun’s translation formed the basis of a rhymed version (1290) by Jean Priorat of Besançon, Li abreyance de l’ordre de chevalerie.