A picture of a decorated figure pointing at a line of the text - The Bishop of Worcester has kindly given permission for the use of this image, which is from an item from his collection. (Bristol)
The oldest surviving pages of the 13th century's most popular story which feature one of medieval European literature's best-known sex scenes have been identified by an academic from the University of Bristol. Le Roman de la Rose or The Romance of the Rose - famously translated and adapted by Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, a century later - is a medieval French poem styled as an allegorical dream vision. Written by two authors in the 1200s, completed by 1280, in medieval French and weighing in at a hefty 22,000 lines, it describes the attempts of a courtier to woo his beloved. The hand-written parchment fragments, from the archives of the Diocese of Worcester, were discovered by chance in the vaults of Worcester Record Office by Professor Nicholas Vincent from the University of East Anglia who asked Professor Marianne Ailes from the University of Bristol's Centre for Medieval Studies and Department of French to help identify them. Professor Ailes said: " Le Roman de la Rose really was the blockbuster of its day. We know how popular it was from the number of surviving manuscripts and fragments, a picture our fragment adds to, and from the number of allusions to the text in other medieval writings. "The fragments I examined were not in great condition as the double sheet was probably used as a folder or binding for other documents.
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