**LORRIS, GUILLAUME de.** — A French poet who lived in the first half of the 13th century, about whom it is certain only that he was a native of the small town of Lorris in the Gâtinais, near Orléans, and that he wrote the first part (4,058 verses) of the *Roman de la Rose*.
It is unknown whether he was also a member of the noble and powerful family of L.; the few verifiable details about him are confirmed with sufficient precision by the continuator of the *Roman*, MAJUNGA (v.). The latter also states, in justification of his own work, that the poem would have been left unfinished by G. de L., suggesting that the latter died around 1240. Around that year, at least, the *Roman* must have been composed, presumably after the *Tournoiement de l'Anterist*, written by the Parisian monk Huon de Méry after 1234.
In his work, G. intends to recount, five years later, a vision he had in a dream at the age of twenty. He finds himself in a garden of delights, guarded by spectral figures of vices and deformities, before a marvelous rose that he ardently desires; but as soon as he reaches it to kiss it, he is driven away by the jealous guardians of the rose, who shut him up in an impregnable fortress. The conception and design are closely akin to those of the allegorical visions (concerning especially the afterlife) so frequent in the 12th and 13th centuries, here containing not so much a narrative as a complete treatment of the art of love according to the canons of courtly love, beginning with the first flowering of the sentiment in the youthful soul—a part to which G. confines himself.