John Lydgate and the Curse of Genius

Abstract

John Lydgate and the Curse of Genius Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs Kamath Few Middle English scholars are now content to view Chaucer's dominance over his fifteenth-century successors as effected in some magical way by the sheer force of his genius. Nevertheless, we still lack the conceptual tools to produce a convincing alternative. —Larry Scanlon1 Of my prest called Genivs …… thou shalt fynde hyt thus:That his power is AuctorisedAnd throgh the world eke solemnysed. —JohnLlydgate, Reson and Sensuallyte(863–66)2 Recent scholarship on John Lydgate has focused on the prolific fifteenth-century Benedictine poet's evident interest in valorizing the English [End Page 32] vernacular and asserting authority for writers in English.3 Mindful of the sixteenth-century Reformation and Renaissance movements, most studies of what has been termed Lydgate's "laureate" poetics look to the auctoritas of Latin texts or to the example of Italian humanists for the English poet's inspiration in this endeavor.4 The question of Lydgate's debt to the French tradition has attracted less attention, despite the importance of French sources to the fourteenth-century English predecessors Lydgate praised, Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower.5 In this essay I argue that the most widely circulated late medieval French composition, the thirteenth-century allegory Le Roman de la rose, merits recognition as an important model for Lydgate's strategy in claiming literary authority.6 Although modern scholars eschew the rather speculative nineteenth-century attribution of the second fragment of the Romaunt of the Rose translation to Lydgate, the corpus commonly recognized as Lydgate's today includes two works that reveal repeated attention to a particular figure found within the Rose.7 The mythic deity named Genius appears in [End Page 33] the personified form of a priest eager to pronounce excommunicating curses in the Middle English translations Reson and Sensuallyte and the Troy Book. Both of these appearances of Genius are textual expansions not found in the direct sources for the English translations; both significantly alter the meaning of the passages into which they are introduced; and both of the translations in question also feature newly interpolated references by name to the Roman de la rose, the first vernacular text to represent Genius as a fully developed character. This repeated special attention to the figure of Genius and to the allegory of the Rose in Lydgate's corpus has never before been noted, although the importance of the Rose and its representation of Genius to Lydgate's English predecessors is well known.8 The Riverside Chaucer declares that "Geoffrey Chaucer was more deeply influenced by the Roman de la rose than by any other French or English work," and Chaucer cultivated recognition as a translator of the Rose in his works.9 Indeed, Eustache Deschamps's ballade praising Chaucer as a transplanter of the Rose's garden constitutes the most direct evidence that survives of Chaucer's literary reputation during his own lifetime.10 Investigations more specifically concerned with the figure of Genius routinely turn to the prominent role the personification plays in Gower's Confessio Amantis, which draws upon the complex Latin heritage of this figure as well as the representation of Genius in the Rose.11 Yet the reception of the [End Page 34] Rose in England does not end with Chaucer, nor is Gower's father confessor the only Middle English representation of Genius. John Lydgate continued the pattern by drawing his own selections from the allegory of the Rose, employing the allegory to enhance the literary authority of English writers in the late Middle Ages. Lydgate's allusions to source texts in translation are legion, but establishing his use of the Rose holds particular importance. Drawing a connection between the Rose and the rise of poetic authority in the French vernacular is customary in modern criticism.12 But we have yet to recognize that the form of allegory popularized in the Rose, particularly the depiction of the character Genius, was also important in creating a canon inclusive of vernacular poetics across the Channel in the fifteenth century. I see allegory as the unexplored term that underwrites Larry Scanlon's theorization of a medieval "poetics of continuity...

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