‘Castration is a motif running through the Rose’ asserts Sylvia Huot in The Romance of the Rose and Its Medieval Readers. The thirteenth-century Old French Romans de la rose that Huot examines, one of the most popular works of the European Middle Ages, occurs in two parts. The original text, an approximately 4,000-line first-person verse allegory composed by Guillaume de Lorris around 1230, recounts the dream vision quest of the young narrator for the rose he seeks. The continuation, written a generation later by Jean de Meun (c. 1270), amounts to an encyclopedic 17,000-line, often satiric gloss on Guillaume's Rose that retells, amplifies, and at times diverges from the young lover's story. The four primary examples that Huot presents of the mutilation motif in the Rose all appear in Jean's poem. David F. Hult, in ‘Language and Dismemberment: Abelard, Origen, and the Romance of the Rose’, arrives at a rather extreme assessment of Jean's work, finding that the author exhibits an ‘unrelenting fascination with castration’. Jean presents the four castration commentaries – on Saturn's dismemberment by his son Jupiter, on Abelard's by the henchmen of his wife's uncle, on Genius's exhortation against it, and on Origen's self castration – as generally negative, even if Jean, as author, identifies some positive results from such violent actions.