Prof. Jonathan Morton - FACULTY AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT 2020 Ep.17

[Music] Hi, I’m Johnny Morton. I’m an Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Italian at Tulane University. And I’m going to talk to you for about 10 minutes about this, which is a book that I co-edited that came out in July of 2020 and it’s called (I’ll read you the title) it’s The ‘Roman de la Rose’ Thirteenth-Century Thought. So as you can probably work out I am a specialist in Medieval French literature. So the Roman de la Rose is French. It’s a book, a very long poem, that was written in French in the 13th century, hence the title. And the Roman de la Rose means the Romance of the Rose.

Now what 01:02 - a romance is, is not entirely clear in the 13th century. Now “roman” in modern French means a novel. In the 12th and 13th century, a “roman” particularly means something that is written in the French language as opposed to being written in Latin. It’s more complicated than that but that’s probably a good place to start. So what I’m really interested in my research, looking at literature written in French, is how it thinks; how it deals with ideas. This is particularly interesting, I think, because the main language in which people talk about science, or philosophy, or medicine, or law, or theology in the Middle Ages in Europe (the middle ages in western Europe) is in Latin. And so this is in French.

Well this one actually- this book is written in English. But the book it’s about, The Roman de la Rose, is written in French. And it’s quite a weird book. What I’m gonna do is tell you a little bit about The Romance of the Rose and then a little bit about why I’m interested in it, and then a little bit about what’s going on in this book. And I may finish with an attempt to persuade you to read this book but… what generally happens, actually, with books like this, this is a collection of essays, is that people might read one or two of the essays or maybe three or four.

So you can always, if you 02:46 - go to the library, you can always take out this book, read an essay, take it out read a paragraph. I’m going to go and talk about medieval literature now. So I’ll stop talking about my book and I’ll talk about The Romance of the Rose. So it’s a very, very weird text. The whole thing happens in a dream. We’re told that the main speaker had a dream when he was younger and the whole dream turned out to be true, everything in it. And it’s sort of a love story, but it’s very surreal.

So in it this guy has a dream, and in this dream he goes into this amazing garden and then he 03:26 - falls in love with the rose, not a woman but a rose. And so it’s called The Romance of the Rose. And as he’s looking at this rose he gets shot by Cupid, who is the god of love, who’s not a cute baby but he’s a kind of quite scary man with a great big bow and arrow. Who shoots him about 20 times and he falls in love with this rose and then he spends the whole poem trying to pluck it. Okay, so this is quite strange and it may be the reason why we give roses on Valentine’s Day. Certainly before this text, the rose was a flower particularly associated with the Virgin Mary. That’s the mother of Jesus in medieval theology.

And after this book it 04:11 - became associated particularly with romantic love or particular parts of the female anatomy. And so that’s already quite strange, right. We’ve got a dream about someone who wants to kiss a flower. The thing that’s really weird about it is that this very long text, the story seems kind of simple but it’s 22,000 verses of poetry. So in terms of a book it’s probably about this thick. I don’t have the book with me on hand to show you, otherwise I could show you exactly how big a poem it is. So the story is not that complicated but what there is in the story is a huge amount of philosophy, huge amount of different ideas. And what I’ve been interested in in my whole research career, not just about The Romance of the Rose, but particularly about it is why people bother putting ideas into literature. Why people bother putting ideas into poetry. And then what happens when you do put ideas into poetry or into fiction? How do you know if you don’t say these ideas clearly in nice clear language. How do you know what the ideas really are? Now this is particularly true when this whole dream is allegorical. So the rose isn’t really a rose.

The rose is supposed 05:41 - to be a woman, but you’re not quite sure who she is or if she’s real. And this is true of the whole of the language of this text. It’s that you’re not sure how much to believe it. And this is particularly true of literary language and poetry. When one word can mean several things at the same time, which is nice if you want to play pretty games with words. But it’s not so useful if you’re trying to advance a scientific theory.

Okay, so what’s the point? Why 06:14 - put so much philosophy into this text? And that is the question that motivated my first book, which is not this one. It’s a different one it came out in 2018 and it’s called (I know this one) it’s called… The Romance of the Rose in its Philosophical Context or The Roman de la rose in its Philosophical Context: Art, Nature, and Ethics. So those are the questions that I’m particularly interested in. What is art? What is nature? How they thought through in a poem, which is very artificial. How does an artificial thing think about nature? And things like that. So my work is quite philosophical, although I’m not a philosopher. So one of the- another thing I should say about the Romance of the Rose is that it is one of the most important pieces of literature in the Middle Ages in Europe. Potentially one of the most important works of literature in the European tradition, even though it’s not that well read anymore. Because it’s in part, it’s so weird and it’s quite difficult.

07:22 - So in the Middle Ages it was incredibly popular. There was only one book in the vernacular, not in Latin, that was copied more and that’s Dante’s Divine Comedy. And so this is a very important book. And it has- the way that it does philosophy is radical, it’s new, and it’s very influential. Not least on poets like Geoffrey Chaucer and Dante as well, actually, and Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and other Italians too, and pretty much anyone writing in French for the next two or three hundred years. So this book is finished in about 1278 thereabouts, maybe 1280. And so this is a question, like I said.

The question I’m interested in is why people, why the authors (and 08:13 - there were two authors) would want- so I’m going to start that bit again. So the question, the question that I’m particularly interested in is why the two authors of the Romance of the Rose, and there are two, they didn’t know each other. One of them left it unfinished and the other one continued it. The question is why did they bother putting all of these ideas in it. And how do we work out what those ideas are. So I had a go at answering this question in a book that came out two and a half years ago now. And then I thought with my colleague, I put this particular this conference together with a a good friend and colleague of mine called Marco Nievergelt and along with another colleague who’s in philosophy called John Marenbon. They’re both wonderful. If you ever come across anything either of them have written I recommend it. So Marco especially and I thought, why don’t we get together a load of specialists in philosophy and make them read the weird book of poetry and see what they make of it. And that’s what happened. So in 2016 we organized a small conference in Paris.

09:27 - And we brought together a series of historians of philosophy, and historians of medicine, and specialists in literature to read the book together and talk about it. And that’s how we ended up with a collection in here. So I can- I’ll just very quickly- I’m gonna hold up the- if you’re interested I’m gonna hold up the titles of the books But do you know what? There’s a website- you can even just- you can look it up on the website. If you go to the website of the publishers called Cambridge University Press. And if you go to their website and you can look up this book and see what’s in it.

10:11 - But I can just- I’ll quickly run you through. I’m going to stop talking fairly soon. I’m going to quickly run you through the kinds of things that we were thinking about. So for my part, I wrote an essay about sophisms and sophistry. So sophistry is kind of fake philosophy. And it gets talked about in Plato. In ancient Greek philosophy the sophists are kind of the enemy of the philosophers. And Aristotle also talks about sophists as people who are fake philosophers.

10:44 - And so I’m interested in how poetry is kind of fake philosophy. And what you have to do to make sense of that fakeness. And how you nonetheless can get something useful from it. So that was my one. Another colleague wrote about law and legal theory. And looked at how the poem dealt with questions, quite detailed questions, that were discussed in legal philosophy in the 13th century. Another person wrote a piece about the terminology of psychology and the imagination. And how this poem is used to think about thinking. Someone else, another philosopher, wrote an essay about what belief is and how that is- that philosophy is expressed in the Romance of the Rose. And so essentially what I’m hoping- so what I’m hoping essentially is that people who later come and study this text will now have to take seriously just how much philosophy there is in it. And this book is going to be a very useful resource for people who may not be experts in philosophy or may not be experts in french poetry but are interested in one of them. And this will help them think about it more. What I might do just quickly, this might get cut. Again I don’t know. This might not make the final cut.

I want to just quickly talk to you about the cover image. So this is from a 14th century manuscript of The Rose. And the manuscripts are often beautifully decorated. And this is a figure called Genius, who is disguised as a bishop. He’s dressed up like a bishop. And this is where you can see the the fakeness. He’s not really a bishop but he looks like one. And he’s giving a lecture to- this is the army of the god of love, who are going to help the central character, he’s called the lover, get to the rose. And what he’s reading out is a sermon that basically says that people should try and have as much sex as they can in order to get into heaven. That’s not the only thing he says, but it’s one of the things that he says because Genius, he’s not a real bishop. He represents, among other things, the principle of the continuing the species. So he wants people to have as much hetero sex as possible.

He also gets himself sidetracked and 13:10 - he goes off in a very very homophobic rant. He’s very not okay with queer sex or non-reproductive sex. And so you have- this kind of illustrates- you have what looks like a teaching scenario. This looks like the transmission of knowledge. And what you have in it is slightly absurd. So then you have to make sense of that. You have to make sense of the absurdity. And you have to make sense of how it is that you can learn from people even when 50 percent of what they say is nonsense.

And sometimes I like to think that that is the kind of problem 13:45 - that students in my classes have to deal with. Where sometimes I will say things that will be useful and sometimes I will say things that are maybe less useful. And I think students, if they take one thing from this video, should be that they should always come to class prepared to think critically about what their teachers tell them. And that’s, I think, what this book is about ultimately. And on that I’m going to stop and I encourage you all to make the most of the library and especially to look at this book in it. [Music] .