SOURCE: Huot, Sylvia. “The Medusa Interpolation in the Romance of the Rose: Mythographic Program and Ovidian Intertext.” Speculum 62, no. 4 (October 1987): 865-77.

In the following essay, Huot compares sections of the Metamorphoses and the Romance of the Rose, arguing there is an inter-textual relationship between the two works.

In a fifty-two-line interpolation appearing towards the end of many Romance of the Rose manuscripts, the narrator compares the female image over the entry to the tower of Jealousy—the one at which Venus fires her burning arrow—to the head of Medusa.¹ This passage entered the Rose manuscript tradition in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, possibly within the lifetime of Jean de Meun; it recurs throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. A reading of the Medusa interpolation raises the important critical issue of significant variants in a manuscript tradition and the evidence they offer for a medieval reading...