Adapting the "Rose" for New Manuscript Contexts: the Case of Poitiers, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 215

This essay examines the different approaches to the adaptation of the Roman de la rose in a selection of late medieval manuscripts, both single item and multi-text codices. Analysing first methods ranging from the collection of a series of extracts to the abridgement of the whole work, we then focus on a fifteenth-century compilatory manuscript from Poitiers which contains 1931 lines of the Rose copied as short gnomic sententiae and longer passages of narrative, thus displaying the techniques of both extraction and abbreviation. The following questions are addressed in this essay: what type of material is retained or omitted; how does the Poitiers compiler deal with the questions of authority and voice; what effect might the use of rubrication have had on a contemporary reader; and how does the adaptation of the Rose sit with the other texts and extracts in this compilation?