Jonathan Morton

Ingenious Genius: Invention, Creation, Reproduction in the High Middle Ages

This article considers the meaning of figures called genii or even given the proper name Genius in twelfth- and thirteenth-century allegorical poetry, specifically in Bernard Sylvester’s Cosmographia, Alain de Lille’s De planctu Naturae and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la rose. For medieval thinkers, the term genius is received from Roman religion as a polyvalent and overdetermined fiction, a god of natural reproduction, birth, place or the whole universe. In medieval poetry, genius-figures are, through metaphors of writing, used to reflect on the relationship between poetic production and sexual reproduction by embodying the paradoxical imbrication of art and nature.