Communication: A Rose, Duality in Public Discourse of Gui de Mori's and Christine de Pizan's Responses to Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose.
Responding to Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose, Gui de Mori and Christine de Pizan use public discourse in the vernacular to address specific audiences of pre-Modern France.
In his role as a religious counselor, Gui addresses his generally uneducated audience of men and women with illustrations and spoken vernacular French in his interpretation of the rose theme and its medieval associations. His iconography illuminates his text, and thus, his audience, of the spiritual element of desire in conjunction with the carnal aspect.
In contrast, Christine addresses her audience in Epistre au Dieu d'amours (Letter to the God of Love, 1399) and Le dit de la Rose (The Tale of the Rose, 1402) by illustrating her intentional design for aural and visual reception, employing the aristocratic courtly vernacular French language, which had taken on the status of a grapholect, to attack the misogyny she perceives in de Meun’s work. Moreover, in her Epistres du debat sur le Roman de la Rose (Letters on the Debate of The Romance of the Rose, 1401-1403), Christine relies on linguistic tactics as she engages in a debate, known as the 'Querelle de la Rose,' confronting the male-dominated academic establishment in which written Latin was the primary mode of discourse.
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