Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/128

106 to show from the Gospel of Saint Luke that formerly a woman’s genitals, the rose of the romance, were sacred. Being convinced of the truth of this impious mysticism, he appealed to the friends of the book, forming a cloud of witnesses, and predicted that Gerson himself would fall madly in love, as had happened to other theologians before him.

Gerson did not succeed in destroying the authority, or, at least, the popularity, of the Roman de la Rose. In 1444 a canon of Lisieux, Estienne Legris, composed a Répertoire du Roman de la Rose. Towards the end of the century Jean Molinet could assert that its sentences were current like pro- verbs. He has given himself the trouble of “moralizing” the whole book, in giving its allegories a religious meaning. The nightingale calling to love meant the voice of the preacher, the rose meant Jesus. Even in the hey-day of the Renaissance, Clément Marot considered that the work deserved to be modernized, and Ronsard did not consider the figures of Bel-Accueil and Faus Danger too worn for use in his verse.