Jean de Meun in his contribution to the Roman de la Rose practices an uncircumcised method of glossing.[1] Jean wraps his controversial defense of punning inside of an image of the foreskin.

Near the conclusion of Jean’s addition to the Rose, Amant brags about his penis, and he employs two litotes to indicate that he is not circumcised (ll. 21323-29). Amant says of his horse that “tel qu’il n’a mestier de ferrer” (ll. 21325; “it does not need to be shod”). And he adds that his staff is made “d’une pel souple san cousture (ll. 21327) “of a supple skin without any seam”). These are obvious euphemisms for his uncut member. Through innuendo, Amant boasts that he is uncircumcised.

These lines serve an important literary-theoretical function. In this particular portion of the poem, Jean defends puns and witticisms. Jean advocates in the Rose for verbal allegory, and a good deal of the controversy surrounding the poem had to do with Jean’s multivalent language.[2]

Soon after describing Amant’s member, Jean explains his theory of interpretation, saying that contraries are always defined in relation to one another and that glossing works through contrariness (ll. 21543-52).

Just five lines after this brief literary-theoretical explication, Amant again refers to his foreskin. He brags that his prepuce has retracted in preparation for the sex act: “a tout mon bourdon defferré” (ll. 21557-58; “my staff became uncovered”).

Amant’s arousal—and his ability to penetrate, erotically and hermeneutically—hinges upon his foreskin, whose existence he thrice acknowledges and whose retraction he describes floridly.

Just after Jean explains how interpretation happens by moving between gloss and text, the movement of Amant’s foreskin embodies this shuttling. The prepuce enacts Jean’s theory of interpretative contrariness. It is protracted, then it is retracted; and so it makes sensible the shuttling of interpretation from sign to referent. In its ultimate unity, however, Amant’s foreskin holds together the contraries.

In other words, Jean’s joke is that the reversibility of figuration—the ability to move from literal to figurative and back again—is realizable through uncircumcision. Jean’s celebration of uncircumcised reading is in marked distinction with orthodox, Pauline hermeneutics, which so often attempted to “cut” the literal from the figurative through readerly circumcision—a process Kathleen Biddick discusses in her Typological Imaginary (U Pennsylvania P, 2003).

[1] Citations from Le Roman de la Rose, tome III, ed. Félix Lecoy (Paris: Libraire Honoré Champion, 1970).

[2] See Earl Jeffrey Richards, “Introduction,” Debating the Roman de la Rose: A Critical Anthology, ed. Christine McWebb (New York: Routledge, 2007), xxi-xxxvi, especially xxxii.