SOURCE: Scanlon, Larry. “Unspeakable Pleasures: Alain de Lille, Sexual Regulation and the Priesthood of Genius.” The Romantic Review 86, no. 2 (March 1995): 213-42.

In the following essay, Scanlon examines the use of the figure Genius in Alan's Complaint of Nature, contending that Alan uses this character to initiate a discussion regarding sexuality and discursive structures in his narrative.

1. the Long Shadow of Medieval Sexuality1

With the appearance of Alain de Lille's De planctu Naturae sometime between 1160 and 1180, the figure Genius became a priest.² Originally a Roman tutelary god, he had already been elevated to an important cosmic functionary in Bernardus Silvestris's Cosmographia, where his office was the originary “union of form and matter.”³ But Bernardus also used the term at the end of the work to describe the testicles, the “twin brothers” in charge of propagation.⁴ As Winthrop Wetherbee remarks in his still indispensable Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth...