Conclusion

Abstract

This chapter turns to the most famous of medieval reflections on the nature of desire, the thirteenth-century Old French masterpiece by Jean de Meun and Guillaume de Lorris, Le roman de la Rose. It examines why medieval love is so relentlessly associated with pain, violence, death, and grief. Though many have studied the Rose, and though its codicological and literary influence remains uncontested, the chapter seeks to unravel why douleur and amors elide in this text, inviting a reconsideration of the text's deployment of love and the emotional communities it strives to create. It argues that the Rose is a flagship case for all the elements teased out in our erotics of grief: taboo and its transgression. The chapter contemplates how the erotics of grief may play out differently in other communities.