de Lorris Guillaume

Guillaume de Lorris was a 13th-century French poet, probably from the town of Lorris near Orléans. Almost everything known about him comes from his connection to The Romance of the Rose (Roman de la Rose), a hugely influential allegorical poem about love.

He is generally credited with writing the first part of the poem, around 4,000 lines. The work became one of the best-known literary texts of the later Middle Ages, and it was later continued by Jean de Meun, whose much longer second part gave the poem an even wider reach.

Because reliable details about Guillaume de Lorris's life have not survived, he remains a somewhat mysterious author. Even so, his contribution helped shape one of medieval French literature's most widely read and discussed works.