Online Encyclopedia

GUILLAUME DE LORRIS (fl. 1230)

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Originally appearing in Volume V12, Page 692 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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GUILLAUME DE LORRIS (fl. 1230)  , the author of the earlier section of the
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Roman de la rose, derives his surname from a small
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town about equidistant from
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Montargis and
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Gien, in the
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present department of Loiret . This and the fact of his authorship may be said to be the only things positively known about him . The rubric of the poem, where his own
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part finishes, attributes
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Jean de Meun's continuation to a period
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forty years later than William's
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death and the consequent interruption of the
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romance . Arguing backwards, this death used to be put at about 126o; but Jean de Meun's own
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work has recently been dated earlier, and so the composition of the first part has been thrown back to a period before 1240 . The author represents himself as having dreamed the dream which furnished the substance of the poem in his twentieth
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year, and as having set to work to "
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rhyme it " five years later . The later and longer part of the Roman shows signs of greater intellectual vigour and wider knowledge than the earlier and shorter, but Guillaume de Lorris is to all appearance more
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original . The
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great features of his four or five thousand lines are, in the first place, the extraordinary vividness and beauty of his word-pictures, in which for colour, freshness and individuality he has not many rivals except in the greatest masters, and, secondly, the fashion of allegorical presentation, which, hackneyed and wearisome as it afterwards became, was evidently in his time new and striking . There are of course traces of it before, as in some romances, such as those of Raoul de Houdenc, in the troubadours, and in other writers; but it was unquestionably Guillaume de Lorris who fixed the style . For an attempt to identify Guillaume de Lorris see L . Jarry, Guillaume de Lorris et le testament d'Alphonse de
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Poitiers (1881) . Also Paulin Paris in the Hist. lift. de la France, vol.
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xxiii .

End of Article: GUILLAUME DE LORRIS (fl. 1230)
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