From the genius of the man to the man of genius, Part two: Inheriting (ideas about) genius

Abstract

In Part One of ?From the Genius of the Man to the Man of Genius’ I argued that classical and medieval inscriptions of genius figures suggest a coevalence between characters in their respective cosmologies, making it relatively more difficult to delineate Man from “spirits” and “other organisms”. The labour that genii performed flowed around two significant tropes of production and reproduction whose specificities were inflected in and across sources. In medieval poetry, for instance, genius figures took up a new role in regard to the reproduction trope, as promoter of virtue (in the form of censuring the seven deadly sins) and condemner of vice (in the form of prohibition against same sex intercourse). The sedimentation (complex processes of character‐formation), directionality (patterns of descent) and sexual ecology (emergence of a field of ethics) that the medieval literature embodies also indexes an opening disarticulation of Man from universe and the possibility of grounding “morality” in and as His love choices. Through a series of narrative structures, binary concepts and new sources of authority under Christianity the figure now referred to in philosophy as “the subject” is given early grounds upon which to form in the medieval poems.

Citation

Baker, B. (2005), "From the genius of the man to the man of genius, Part two: Inheriting (ideas about) genius", History of Education Review, Vol. 34 No. 2, pp. 78-94. https://doi.org/10.1108/08198691200500011