Images of opening, penetration and closure in theRoman de la Rose

Abstract

Many of the almost three hundred manuscript copies of the Roman de la Rose surviving from the later Middle Ages contain extensive cycles of illustration. Over the years some of the most important miniature cycles have been subjected to a traditional kind of taxonomic analysis, classifying them according to date, provenance, style and iconography, as well as having been critically discussed in terms of their word-image relationships. While the cumulative results of the first kind of scholarly treatment remain in an inchoate, fragmentary and all but useless state, the ground~breaking work of Rosamund Tuve and John Fleming has constituted a solid base from which most of us now view the Rose cycles. To see the medieval illustrations as glossing the text in the sense of providing a simple explication or allegorical unveiling of meaning has enabled modern readers to gain closer access to medieval experiences of reading the text. But the nagging doubt left hy Tuve's ultimate disappointment in what she perceived to be an insufficiency and redundancy in the images still needs to be addressed. I would argue that our frustrating perceptions of inadequacy and superfluity in the Rose cycle illustrations stem from the prevailing assumption that text illustration is visual representation functioning as a substitute for the text or its ‘unwritten’ exegesis. However, the text is already there before the reader — hence there is no need to replicate its content in images. At the same time, as Tuve has argued, there is a profound gap between the capacity of images to convey meaning and the complex textually driven demands of allegory. Instead of dealing with text-image relationships as problems of representation, I shall explore some aspects of the Rose cycles with a view to discovering what the images do in terms of how visual representations of the text can function as strategies of appropriation and standing for the reader. Thus it is not my intention to propose new interpretations of the allegorical text based on reading images, but rather to show how images engage the reader in the interpretive process.

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