Per speculum: Seeing mirrors in The Romance of the Rose and Pearl

Abstract

In the twenty-first century, we are used to thinking of our eyes as clear windows onto the world around us. For audiences in the later Middle Ages, however, the human eye was a speculum, a dark mirror that alienated gazers from a realer world beyond. This essay uses the speculum as a model to explore reader-text relationships in The Romance of the Rose (c. 1275) and Pearl (c. 1375-1400). I argue that the Romance of the Rose and Pearl are unstable mirrors that condense and distort their narrators’ dream-experiences into images we are capable of imagining. These textual specula do not displace the specula of our physical eyes, but exist alongside them in complex relationship. Through a visual analysis of key illuminations in the Rose and Pearl manuscripts, I explore the ways in which the literal specula of medieval responders shaped, and were shaped by, the images in the written texts. I then examine how the synthesis of poem and illumination creates a third “text”, a super-speculum that colours the visual experience of readers in the present. Ultimately, I argue that The Romance of the Rose and Pearl use the gap between the dream and the text to highlight the larger discrepancy between the “real” world and the world that we see. In doing so, these texts turn our gaze back on the speculum itself, in an endless cycle of inward-looking.