e New Testament by the Old, one being an allegory of
the other: the adventure of Jonah and the whale was an allegory of the
resurrection; the Bestiaries were series of allegories; the litanies of
the Virgin lists of symbols. The methods of pious authors were adopted
by worldly ones; Love had his religion, his allegories, his litanies,
not to speak of his paradise, his hell, and his ten commandments. He had
a whole celestial court of personified abstractions, composed of those
tenuous and transparent beings who welcome or repel the lover in the
garden of the Rose. It was a new religion, this worship of woman,
unknown to the ancients; Ovid no longer sufficed, imitators could not
help altering his aim and ideal; the new cult required a gospel; that
gospel was the "Roman de la Rose."[460]

The discrepancies in the book did not shock the generality of readers;
art at that time was full of contrasts, and life of contradictions, and
the thing was so usual that it went unnoticed. Saints prayed on the
threshold of churches, and gargoyles laughed at the saints. Guillaume de
Lorris built the porch of his cathedral of Love, and placed in the
niches tall, long figures of pure and noble mien. Jean de Meun, forty
years later, continued the edifice, and was not sparing of gargoyles,
mocking, grotesque, and indecent. Thence followed interminable
discussions, some holding for Guillaume, others for Jean, some rejecting
the whole romance, others, the most numerous, accepting it all. These
dissensions added still more to the fame of the work, and it was so
popular that there exist more than two hundred manuscripts of it.[461]
The wise biographer of the wise king Charles V., Christina of Pisan,
protested in the name of insulted women: "To you who have beautiful
daughters, and desire well to introduce them to honest life, give to
them, give the Romaunt of the Rose, to learn how to discern good from
evil; what do I say, but evil from good! And of what utility, nor what
does it profit listeners to hear such horrible things?" The author
"never had acquaintance nor association with an honourable or virtuous
woman"; he has known none save those of "dissolute and evil life," and
has taken all the others to be according to that pattern.[462] The
illustrious Gerson, in the fifteenth century, did the romance the honour
of refuting it by a treatise according to rule; but the poem was none
the less translated into Latin, Flemish, and English, printed a n