Early
The Romance of the Rose was both popular and controversial. One of the most widely read works in France through the Renaissance, it was possibly the most read book in Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries.[2] Its emphasis on sensual language and imagery, along with its supposed promulgation of misogyny, provoked attacks by Jean Gerson, Christine de Pizan, Pierre d'Ailly, and many other writers and moralists of the 14th and 15th centuries. The historian Johan Huizinga has written: "It is astonishing that the Church, which so rigorously repressed the slightest deviations from dogma of a speculative character, suffered the teaching of this breviary of the aristocracy (for the Roman de la Rose was nothing else) to be disseminated with impunity."[3]
Modern
Later reactions suggested that it had a somewhat encyclopedic quality. The nineteenth-century scholar and writer Gaston Paris wrote that it was "an encyclopedia in disorder", the British author C. S. Lewis described it as having an "encyclopedic character", and the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin wrote that the work was "encyclopedic (and synthetic) in its content".[4][5] One historian wrote that while the Roman de la Rose is obviously not an encyclopedia, "it evokes one, represents one, dreams one, perhaps, with all its aspirations and limitations".[6]
