Jean de Meun

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. Jean de Meung says that in his youth he composed songs that were sung in every public place and school in France. 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 Meun, and was then bestowed by a certain Adam d'Andely on the Dominicans. He was buried in the now-demolished church of Paris's Dominican monastery, which was also on Rue Saint-Jacques. ==Roman de la Rose==

In the enumeration of his own works he places first his continuation of the Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris. The date of this second part (lines 4,089–21,780) is generally fixed between 1268 and 1285 by a reference in the poem to the death of Manfred and Conradin, executed in 1268 by order of Charles of Anjou (d. 1285) who is described as the present king of Sicily. M. F. Guillon (Jean Clopinel, 1903). However, considering the poem primarily as a political satire, places it in the last five years of the 13th century. and later by Charles Dahlberg. ==Other works==

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, which itself was shortly after versified by Jean Priorat. He also produced a spirited version, the first in French, of the letters of Abélard and Héloïse. A 14th-century manuscript of this translation in the Bibliothèque Nationale has annotations by Petrarch. His translation of the De consolatione philosophiae of Boethius 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 spirituali 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 monorhyme, and contains advice to the different classes of the community. ==Notes==