Jean De Meung Biography

Jean de Meun or Jean de Meung (c. 1250 – c. 1305) was a French author best known for his continuation of the Roman de la Rose.

He was born Jean Clopinel or Jean Chopinel at Meung-sur-Loire. Tradition asserts that he studied at the University of Paris. He was, like his contemporary, Rutebeuf, a defender of Guillaume de Saint-Amour and a bitter critic of the mendicant orders. Most of his life seems to have been spent in Paris, where he possessed, in the Rue Saint-Jacques, a house with a tower, court and garden, which was described in 1305 as the house of the late Jean de Meung, and was then bestowed by a certain Adam d'Andely on the Dominicans. Jean de Meung says that in his youth he composed songs that were sung in every public place and school in France.

Jean de Meun translated in 1284 the treatise De Re Militari of Vegetius into French as Le livre de Végèce de l'art de chevalerie. He also produced a spirited version, the first in French, of the letters of Abélard and Heloise. A 14th-century manuscript of this translation in the Bibliothèque Nationale has annotations by Petrarch. His translation of the De consolatione philosophiae of Boëthius is preceded by a letter to Philip IV in which he enumerates his earlier works, two of which are lost: De spirituelle amitié from the De spirituals amicitia of Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1166), and the Livre des merveilles d'Hirlande from the Topographia Hibernica, or De Mirabilibus Hiberniae of Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald de Barri). His last poems are doubtless his Testament and Codicille. The Testament is written in quatrains in monorime, and contains advice to the different classes of the community.