Lorris, Guillaume de

LORRIS, GUILLAUME de. - French poet who lived in the first half of the 13th century, of whom it is known with certainty only that he came from the small town of Lorris in the Gâtinais, near Orléans, and that he wrote the first part (4058 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, Jean de Meung (v.). The latter also asserts, in order to justify his own work, that the poem had been left unfinished by G. de L., suggesting that the latter died around 1240. It was around that year, at least, that the Roman must have been composed, presumably after the Tournoiement de l'Antecris, written by the Parisian monk Huon de Méry after 1234.

In his work G. sets out to recount, five years later, a vision he had in a dream at the age of twenty. He finds himself introduced into a garden of delights, watched over by spectral figures of vices and deformities, in the presence of a wondrous rose that he ardently desires; but, as soon as he comes to kiss it, he is driven out by the jealous guardians of that rose, who shut him up in an impregnable fortress. The conception and design are quite similar to those of the allegorical visions (concerning especially the afterlife) so frequent in the 12th and 13th centuries, here enclosing the purpose not so much of a narrative as of a complete treatise on the art of love according to the canons of courtly love, beginning from the first blossoming of the feeling in the youthful soul; and this is the part at which G. stops.

Enzo Bottasso