Jean de Meun

Jean de Meun presents his French translation of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy to Margaret of Anjou in a fanciful miniature from the 15th-century manuscript Jena, Bibliothek der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität, Ms. fol. 85

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

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. ) 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.