My dramatic reading was from The Romance of the Rose, a wildly popular medieval allegory written in 13th century France. Although a single name describes this literary work, it actually consists of two separate parts written by two separate authors, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. De Loris wrote his part around 1237, and de Meun, followed de Lorris' original by about 40 years.

The work is an allegory cast in the form of a vision where a young man (the Lover) tries to take possession of a rosebud with whom he has fallen desperately in love. Sadly for the young man, the rosebud resides in a castle of chastity. A cast of characters guards the castle including Jealousy, Danger, and Reason. The Lover must successfully get past the castle guardians in order to find his rosebud and possess Love. He has no lack of allies including Desire, Cupid and Venus herself, while other allegorical characters serve primarily to satirize contemporary advice about love and sexual relationships. The major character of this type is La Vieille, the Old Woman.

De Loris wrote the first 4058 lines, and de Meun wrote the much longer section, lines 4059-21780. Both authors wrote in Middle French in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, but otherwise the sections are extremely different. Modern scholarship argues strenuously over the unity of the sections, or lack thereof.

They are very different. De Meun's much longer section contains a level of irony, cynicism and sarcasm that de Loris' section lacks. Major scholarly opinions include:

• Other than the allegorical plot and characters, the two sections are entirely different. De Loris wrote his part of the allegory to seriously discuss human love and desire, while de Meun used his to viciously satirize contemporary personalities and behavior.
• The writing styles are different, but both authors have the same goal: using allegory to explore human love and desire.
• The Romance is an allegory of the Christian doctrine of the Fall. (This is actually a widely respected scholarly opinion.)

In any case, the extremely different style and treatments of the two sections faithfully serve the theme of the Lover's single-minded, never-say-die pursuit of the guarded rose.

The poem was extremely popular for its time and extensively quoted in period letters. Not all readers were positive about de Meun's satiric view of women, and we have the documentation for some raging debates. In 1401, one of the French court's royal secretaries, Jean de Montreuil, wrote a treatise praising Jean de Meun's section of the Romance. He sent the treatise to a woman well-known poet Christine de Pisan. Christine promptly wrote him back objecting to de Meun's poor treatment of women in the poem. Later other writers, all men, got involved in the quarrel on both sides of the fence. Some of them roundly attacked Christine for her "outrageous presumption" and "excessively foolish pride," to which she replied "Oh darkened understanding! Oh perverted knowledge!" and to another writer, whom she essentially accused of being a querulous blowhard, "A small dagger of knife point can pierce a great bulging sack!"

The Romance also influenced the works of other authors like Chaucer, Gower, Dante and Petrarch. Chaucer's Wife of Bath seems to owe a great deal to La Vieille, the Romance's lewd Old Woman. Both fictional women share outrageous beliefs concerning sexuality and marriage, and the proper gender to dominate a marriage. (Hint: it isn't the man.)

The character of La Vieille is not a sympathetic one. Her audience a nervous young man named Fair Welcoming is outwardly polite but secretly thinks of her as "the senile old whore!" Below is her charming introduction:

An old beldame to spy upon him there
No other duty had but to keep watch
Lest he some folly might commit. No man
Could trick her with a gesture or a sign;
For there was no device she did not know,
Since in her youth she'd suffered all the pains
And joys that that Love unto his servants gives.
Although Fair Welcome listened and kept still,
Fearing the hag, he could no motion make
So cautiously that she could not perceive
The thought behind his simple countenance;
For well she knew the ancient dance of love.

La Vieille is the essence of the sadder but wiser woman... or not. Unfortunately she did not learn her lesson well. In her youth she was beautiful and had many lovers, but she ruined herself by falling in love with a cruel man who beat her, took all her money, and left her in the dust. Now she delights in "educating" young women on how to seduce multiple lovers and get rich off them, and why they should never trust men. Her speech, while it pretends to be sound advice, would sound to the medieval mind as exactly the lewd nonsense it is. Fair Welcoming, the young man (or woman) to whom the lesson is directed, secretly rejects her advice in favor of constancy and love.

La Vieille is a precursor of several important medieval works, including Chaucer's Canterbury Tales -- the Wife of Bath's Prologue contains heavy references to La Vieille's speech, and the character of the Prioress in the General Prologue borrows freely from La Vieille's discourse on a lady's table manners. In turn, La Vieille appears to have borrowed her sex advice from Dipsas, the Old Bawd character in the third book of Ovid's infamous Ars amatoria the one that got him exiled from Rome.

In this work, La Vieille's suspect advice centers around her insistence that since no man is true, women should get whatever they can out of many lovers. Thus they will be rich by the time they lose their looks. She suggests all kinds of artifice to prolong beauty and to improve on nature, table manners (you should not drink wine with grease on your upper lip since that leaves unattractive gobbets of grease in the cup), ways to cuckold your husband, how to take a lover for all the money he's worth and how to throw him out when he's penniless and enlisting the help of your servants, nurse, sisters and mother in fleecing him for even more. After all, they benefit from his gifts as well.

La Vieille has a very long speech full of ghastly litanies of infamous love affairs gone wrong, fine medieval manners (try those at your next SCA feast), and a lesson on fleecing your lovers. Above all, a woman should never love, for a man is never true.

References
La Querelle de la Rose: letters and documents. (14th century). Edited by Joseph L. Baird and John R. Kane. Chapel Hill: U.N.C. Dept. of Romance Languages: [distributed by University of North Carolina Press], 1978. (170 p.)

De Lorris, Guillaume, and de Meun, Jean; The Romance of the Rose (Roman de la Rose) (trans. by Charles Dahlberg) Univ. of New England, 1983

Paré, Gérard; Les Idges et les Lettres au XIIIE Siècle: Le Roman de la Rose. (1947). Translated by Joseph L. Baird. (Montreal: Edition le Centre de Psychologie et de Pedagogie.

Lewis, C.S.; The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. (1936). Oxford University Press: Oxford.