Jean de meun biography channels
Tradition asserts that he studied at the University of Paris. He was, like his contemporary, Rutebeuf , a defender of Guillaume de Saint-Amour and a bitter critic of the mendicant orders. Jean de Meung says that in his youth he composed songs that were sung in every public place and school in France. Most of his life seems to have been spent in Paris, where he possessed, in the Rue Saint-Jacques, a house with a tower, court and garden, which was described in as the house of the late Jean de Meun, and was then bestowed by a certain Adam d'Andely on the Dominicans.
In the enumeration of his own works he places first his continuation of the Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris. The date of this second part lines 4,—21, [ 2 ] is generally fixed between and by a reference in the poem to the death of Manfred and Conradin , executed in by order of Charles of Anjou d. Guillon Jean Clopinel, However, considering the poem primarily as a political satire , places it in the last five years of the 13th century.
Jean de Meun doubtless edited the work of his predecessor, Guillaume de Lorris, before using it as the starting-point of his own vast poem, running to 19, lines. The continuation of Jean de Meun is a satire on the monastic orders, on celibacy, on the nobility, the papal see , the excessive pretensions of royalty, and especially on women and marriage.
Guillaume had been the servant of love, and the exponent of the laws of " courtoisie "; Jean de Meun added an "art of love," describing with brutality the supposed vices of women and the means by which men may outwit them. Jean de Meun embodied the mocking, sceptical spirit of the fabliaux.
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He did not share in current superstitions, he had no respect for established institutions, and he scorned the conventions of feudalism and romance. His poem shows in the highest degree, in spite of the looseness of its plan, the faculty of keen observation, of lucid reasoning and exposition, and it entitles him to be considered the greatest of French medieval poets.
He handled the French language with an ease and precision unknown to his predecessors, and the length of his poem was no bar to its popularity in the 13th and 14th centuries. Part of its vogue was no doubt because the author, who had mastered practically all the scientific and literary knowledge of his contemporaries in France, had found room in his poem for a great amount of useful information and for numerous citations from classical authors.