Alastair Minnis: Magister Amoris: The Roman de la Rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics.

This is a richly rewarding and stimulating book. Though the author’s “fundamental assumption being that the poem admits of various and varied reading, indeed invites them” (p. v) is straightforward and plausible enough, it would be quite misleading to take this as the book’s chief message. As Minnis says of a number of earlier accounts: “vague and totalizing categorizations will simply not work for either the ‘end’ or the ending of the Rose. Far more sophisticated – and contested – sites of value are involved” (p. 24). What is involved, according to this persuasive and generously documented study, is the whole body of the medieval commentary tradition which provided such a colourful and controversial set of criteria, of methods and of value-judgements that any simplifying and uninformed reading of this unruly text is bound to remain partial and fragmentary.

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