Gem: “Old Contemporary Poets”: Constructing the Present of the Literary Past

Article by Estelle Doudet

Clad in a flowing cloak and robe, the man gazes into the distance with a look that is curious, perhaps even ironic. His clothing offers few clues as to the era in which he might have lived, but it suggests the social status of a cleric, a hypothesis reinforced by the round cap he wears. In contrast, the figure’s age is emphasized: the wrinkles on his face and the hands supported by a staff evoke old age. They also metaphorically suggest a belonging to the past. This engraved portrait, which opens chapter 91 of Book VI of Les Vrais Pourtraits et Vies des Hommes Illustres by André Thevet (1516–1592), depicts Jean de Meun, the French writer active in the second half of the thirteenth century.

By the time Thevet published his final major work in 1584, the author of the Roman de la Rose had long been regarded as a founding father of French letters. This explains his inclusion among the few vernacular writers in the pantheon of great men assembled by the historian. Yet, as Thevet himself notes, “it is not easy to determine precisely” the dates of birth and death of a writer who had lived two centuries earlier. Only the references that Meun may have made to his own time could help locate his period of activity. However, if such references exist in certain dedications by the “old poet, ” they are inconsistent: Le Livre de confort Boece is dedicated to Philip IV of France (r. 1286–1314), whereas Dodechedron—a divinatory treatise falsely attributed to Meun in the sixteenth century—is addressed to Charles V (r. 1364–1380). To navigate these chronological uncertainties, Thevet resorts to a well-known historical parallel: Meun, he claims, “was a contemporary of Dante, the Italian poet.”

André Thevet was not the first literary historian to take an interest in the contemporaneity of two authors then regarded as the founding figures of French and Italian letters. The Burgundian Jean Lemaire de Belges (1473–1524) had already noted it in La Concorde des deux langages (1511): “the good master Jehan de Meun was contemporary—that is, of the same time and faculty—as Dante.” Yet reconstructing the present of a prestigious past served different purposes at the beginning and the end of the sixteenth century. For Lemaire, evoking the mythical journey that supposedly brought Dante to Paris around 1300—where he met Meun and became both his admirer and “emulator”—aimed to justify the ties uniting French- and Italian-speaking poets “in our time,” around 1500. The temporal community formed by the author of the Roman de la Rose and the writer of the Divine Comedy, bound by both complicity and rivalry, was imagined as extending seamlessly into the intercultural exchanges of the Italian Wars. By contrast, in 1584, Thevet drew on Dante’s chronology to more precisely delimit Meun’s period of activity. Les Vrais Pourtraicts presented their parallel lives in terms of a shared time of living and dying—what Jean Bouchet, another of Thevet’s sources, had defined in 1545 as vivre et mourir ensemble. In emphasizing their “ancientness,” Thevet deliberately distanced both Jean de Meun and Dante from his own time. They no longer appear as the “ancient sources” of a tradition still alive in the works of the “moderns,” to borrow Lemaire’s terms, but as “old poets” with “rusted pens,” whom the historian alone can rescue from the remnants of a decaying memory—that is, as authors of the ‘Middle Ages’.

These two contrasting ways of conceptualising the present of a past age illustrate the transformative power of shifting perceptions, representations, and reconstructions of cultural epochs throughout the sixteenth century. In French-speaking regions, the decades from 1500 to 1530 saw numerous writers assert, for various reasons, a certain continuity between their own practices and those of their predecessors—primarily, those of the fifteenth century. By around 1550, discontinuity had emerged as a new criterion for evaluating poetic production. Certain avant-gardes embraced a rhetoric of rupture. One thinks, for instance, of the young radicals of the Pléiade and their manifesto, La Deffence et illustration by du Bellay (1549). Other intellectual circles placed greater value on a reflective return to a past now conceived as “origins”—a literary and cultural past open to archaeological inquiry or to reinvention as a form of national antiquity. Fauchet, with his Recueil de l’origine de la langue et poésie françoise (1581), Pasquier, with his Recherches de la France (also published in 1581), and Thevet, belong to such interpretive communities, which came to dominate the decades from 1570 to 1600.

Nevertheless, the combative tone with which André Thevet defended a Jean de Meun threatened by “the prison of oblivion” invites a more nuanced reading of this explanatory framework. From its earliest uses in French in the fifteenth century—particularly among writers of the Burgundian principality—the notion of contemporaneity carried a discriminating connotation: to share the same present did not necessarily mean to think alike or be valued equally.

Unlike Dante, Jean de Meun was not always regarded as a consensual founding figure. His “true portrait” thus became, for the polemicist Thevet, a weapon. On one hand, it served to target Thevet’s personal adversaries, such as the Anglican theologian John Bale (1495–1563), accused of having “Anglicised” the Roman de la Rose by overly praising Chaucer’s adaptations of Meun. On the other hand, it allowed him to attack those who refused to recognise in Jean de Meun the embodiment of the “French spirit” as Thevet imagined it: bawdy, witty, and Catholic. Among these “censors,” particular scorn is reserved for the “displeased” female readers. To ridicule them, Thevet inserted a facetious anecdote into the poet’s biography: Jean de Meun, he claims, was summoned by courtly ladies of his time to account for his scandalous romance. The boldest among them accused him of offending them with obscene verse and misogynistic fictions. Yet the witty poet reportedly escaped condemnation by inviting “the greatest whore” to punish him in public.

In reality—though Thevet does not acknowledge it—the accusation voiced by the “bold” lady reprises arguments first articulated by Christine de Pizan in her Debate on the Roman de la Rose (1401). It was, in fact, Christine de Pizan who first introduced the parallel between Jean de Meun and Dante. She argued in the Debate that the Divine Comedy was “a hundred times better composed” than the celebrated Roman de la Rose and more beneficial to its readers, leaving no justification, in her view, for lavishing praise upon Meun. Although Christine did not attempt to situate Dante and Jean chronologically, her argument had the effect of suggesting a simultaneity in their production while firmly denying any ethical or aesthetic equivalence between their works. Contemporary with Dante, Jean de Meun was nonetheless his inferior. For Christine, this meant his work no longer deserved to speak to the female readership of her own time.

By contrast, in the “life” crafted by Thevet, Dante appears merely as a historical counterpart to Meun. The anecdote mocking the “displeased” female readers further blurs temporal boundaries to achieve precisely what Thevet’s antiquarian method purported to resist: inviting readers at the end of the sixteenth century to see in the first “great French writer” a man of their own time.

To be published

Estelle Doudet, “Les communautés temporelles du XVI^e siècle face au ‘Moyen Âge’. Penser, représenter et évaluer un passé littéraire”. In La Culture médiévale à la Renaissance, edited by Adeline Desbois-Ientile, Nicolas Le Cadet et Sandra Provini. Geneva: Droz, to be published.

This research is part of WP1: Figuring Moments. Discursive and Visual Forms of the Present, within the subproject Modern Languages, Contemporary Poetics: French, Dutch, German, and English (14th–17th Centuries).

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Bouchet, Jean. Epistres morales et familieres du Traverseur. Paris: De Marnef, 1545. Book I, Epistle 14.

Christine de Pizan. Le Livre des epistres du debat sus le Rommant de la rose. Edited by Andrea Valentini. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016.

Lemaire de Belges, Jean. La Concorde des deux langages. Edited by Jean Frappier. Paris: Droz, 1947.

Thevet, André. Vrais Pourtraits et Vies des hommes illustres. Paris: Veuve Kervert and Gilles Chaudière, 1584. Vol. II, Book VI, chap. 91, “Jean Clopinel, dict de Meung,” 499r–502v.

 Secondary Sources

Bruder, Anthony J. Recovering the Medieval in the French Renaissance: Claude Fauchet’s Veilles ou Observations. Geneva: Droz, 2024.

Lestringant, Frank. “Vrai portrait et vie de Jean Clopinel, dit de Meung.” In Sous la leçon des vents. Le Monde d’André Thevet, cosmographe de la Renaissance, 101–13. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2020.

Lombart, Nicolas. “Les nom et renom de Jean de Meun à la Renaissance: des ‘arts poétiques’ aux ‘vies’ des auteurs illustres.” In La Fortune de Jean de Meun dans les lettres françaises, edited by Nicolas Lombart and Silvère Menegaldo, 176–204. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2020.

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