de Lorris Guillaume

Guillaume de Lorris was a 13th-century French poet, remembered for beginning The Romance of the Rose (Roman de la Rose), one of the best-known works of medieval literature. He is generally associated with the town of Lorris in north-central France, but reliable details about his life are scarce.

His section of The Romance of the Rose is usually described as a courtly dream vision, centered on love, desire, and symbolic allegory. The poem was later continued on a much larger scale by Jean de Meun, and together the two parts gave the work an enormous readership for centuries.

Because so little biographical information survives, Guillaume is known mostly through the poem itself and the influence it carried across medieval French and European writing. That air of mystery only adds to his appeal: he stands as one of those early authors whose surviving work became far more famous than the life behind it.