[WARD] ROMANCE OF THE ROSE 197 
de Jean de Meung, ou les sept articles de la foi)! together with a request 
for a copy of her letter to Jean de Montreuil, in order that he might be 
informed concerning her point of view. This communication (docu- 
ment V) is dated September 13, 1401. 
After his request had been promptly acceded to, Gontier Col 
hastened to write again to Christine (document VI, September 15, 1401). 
This letter censures Christine sharply for her narrowmindedness regard- 
ing Jean de Meung’s great work, and rather brusquely calls upon her to 
retract her statements and sue for pardon. 
Shortly afterward the authoress replied to this (in document VII). 
She now not only refuses to abandon in the slightest degree the position 
she had taken, but proceeds to adduce other reasons for condemning the 
poem and to repeat some arguments already brought forward. 
Christine went further still. With an impulse born of clever 
feminine intuition, she assembled the documents of the debate and 
“la veille de la chandeleur 1401” addressed one copy, with a dedicatory 
letter (document VIII) to the queen, and the other, also with a letter 
introducing the subject (document IX), to Guillaume de Tignonville, 
prévot of Paris. These two personages already favored her side of 
the case, and Christine’s appeal to Cesar, as it were, was well calculated 
to further prejudice public opinion in her favor. 
Christine had doubtless been confirmed already in her attitude by 
the support of Jean Gerson. The latter had written in 1399 a Sermon 
contre la luxure, in one place in which, with all the authority he 
possessed, he condemned the Roman de la Rose to the fire: “Au feu, 
bonnes gens, au feu!...... C’est le remède meilleur.” Gerson’s 
condemnation of the work was based on grounds somewhat 
different from those of Christine. He saw in it a work sub- 
versive of private and public morality. Although a humanist and 
a friend of humanists, he failed to see the real literary and 
philosophical merits of Jean de Meung’s work, and endeavored to use 
the great authority of the church to wipe it out of existence. On May 
18, 1402, he wrote his T'ractatus contra Romantium de Rosa? which we 
reprint here (document X). This is cast in an allegorical mould, in the 
form of a “ vision” —if he thought at all that he was borrowing a form of 
composition established by his opponents, he probably regarded it as 
fighting the devil with fire—and is a veritable procés-verbal against the 
romance. He divides his work into eight articles, and writes in a vivid, 
forceful, and conclusive style. 

"Cf. M. Méon, Roman de la Rose, t. IIL., p. 331 sqq. 
? Cf. also Bib. nat. fr. 1563, fol. 180 a. sqq. 
