ABSTRACT
Thus far, most of the representations of Eve examined in this book included her in texts concerned with Genesis, and although there was room in these to consider her at some length, sex and gender were elements in a larger project. However, some works were more specifi cally focused on sex and gender differences, such as the sixth of Juvenal’s Satires (c.ad 220) which was frequently infl uential in the medieval period when the Satires was a curriculum text.1 The question of the worth of women became a matter for discussion and Eve often became a focus in her own right as the other issues in Genesis were put to one side. Works dealing with women’s dignity were written throughout Europe in a genre that was still very much alive in the Renaissance. Sometimes these were grouped together when a text sparked off a reply and was followed by a cluster of interrelated texts arguing various positions on the nature of women. A milestone of this kind is Jean de Meun’s provocative continuation of Guillaume de Lorris’s The Romance of the Rose (Roman de la rose, c.1280), which in its composite form reigned for two hundred years as one of the most admired vernacular poems.2 De Meun represented a reaction to the chivalric tradition and its exaltation of female power and virtue. He combined bourgeois criticism of women, marriage, and nobility with observations from the theological and secular misogynist traditions (including Juvenal) in a poem that has been described as a ‘humorous and witty retelling of the story of the Fall’ (although De Meun writes nothing explicitly about Eve). The succeeding debate is known as the querelle des femmes (‘the argument about women’) and it was one in which Eve played a central role.3
