Dreams of Lovers and Lies of Poets: Poetry, Knowledge and Desire in the "Roman De La Rose"

The Roman de la Ros explicitly offers an 'art of love', while also repeatedly asserting that both the experience of love is impossible to put into words. An examination of the intertextual density of the Rose, with its citations and adaptations of a range of Latin authors, shows that the discourse of bodily desire, pleasure, and trauma emerges indirectly from the juxtaposition and conflation of sources. The Ovide moralise, in turn, produces moral and spiritual teachings through the suppression or sublimation of bodily desire; in so doing, it also offers an implicit response to the dazzling but problematic Rose. In different ways, both texts employ poetic allegory as a language that can express the unspeakable and the ineffable.