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F O U R Perhaps no ideology is so central to the institution of literary history as that of filial piety. Despite recent debate over the content and function of literary canons, and despite theoretical critiques of organic, continuous historiEulogies and cal models, the implicit frame within which we Usurpations read and teach is still grounded, in the last resort , on notions of sources and influence thoroughly genealogical at their core.1 It is, indeed, Father Chaucer hard to imagine a form of literary history that in the would not be genealogical. Could we imagine Regement of Princes the field of literature other than as a succession of texts arrayed in time, locked together as a category by the influence of the earlier over the later and given meaning by the dynamic interrelations among them? In the assumed parthenogenesis of this tradition, the metaphor of paternity, the relation of fathers and sons, has always been central.2 1. The earliest and most influential critique of this model has come through feminist arguments that characterized the idea of literary canons as exclusionary devices. This critique has gained additional momentum from the skepticism toward organic, teleological models of history widespread in poststructuralist thought. Influential examples of these critiques include Michel Foucault’s ‘‘What Is an Author,’’ in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. and trans. Bouchard and Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113–38; and in the field of medieval studies, Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), and Louise Fradenburg, ‘‘ ‘Voice, Memorial’: Loss and Reparation in Chaucer’s Poetry,’’ Exemplaria 2 (1990): 169–202. 2. A. C. Spearing emphasizes the ubiquity of this metaphor among poets: ‘‘There is ample precedent for seeing the authority of the literary precursor over his successors as analogous to the authority of the father over his sons. Lucretius refers to Epicurus as father; Horace and Propertius both refer to Ennius as father; Cicero calls Isocrates the father of eloquence and Herodotus the father of history; 108 The Bureaucratic Muse This metaphor has been nowhere more influential than in representations of early fifteenth-century English verse. The old label for this poetry, ‘‘Chaucerian ,’’ has always served, to a greater degree than most such nominative constructions, as a dynastic marker, suggesting that poets like Hoccleve and Lydgate were important chiefly for their custodianship as heirs.3 Consequently , a sense of their poetry as ‘‘servile imitation’’ has always marked the reception of this verse, and its defining characteristics have been read largely as repetitions of or deviations from the models established by Chaucer.4 It was the authority of the Chaucerian example that established the terms under which Ricardian vernacular experiments were consolidated and formed into a relatively unitary tradition. As A. C. Spearing has suggested, ‘‘the fatherhood of Chaucer was in effect the constitutive idea of the English poetic tradition.’’5 More recent studies of fifteenth-century verse have returned frequently to this genealogical motif. The most recent, and most ambitious , treatment of this period, Seth Lerer’s Chaucer and His Readers, has made this genealogical metaphor central to the period’s vision of itself, suggesting that paternity was one of the key metaphors to structure both poetic identity and practice in the early fifteenth century.6 One difficulty, however, in discussing the impact of this metaphor in the early fifteenth century is the fact that it was actually used by only one poet, Thomas Hoccleve. Although Dryden’s influence has made the title commonplace , and although there is certainly some continuity between the and so on. . . . Descent and inheritance from father to son provide a basic explanatory model for literary history, and the model retains its power, for example in Harold Bloom’s conception of the tensely Oedipal relation of son to father as characterizing the whole of English poetic history from Milton to the present.’’ Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance, 92. 3. As Caroline Spurgeon wrote of Lydgate and Hoccleve: ‘‘So great and wholehearted was the admiration and devotion given to Chaucer by these two men, his friends and followers, that we cannot doubt they would have been the first to acknowledge it fitting that the principal value of their writings to us—five centuries later—lies in their references to their ‘maister Chaucer.’ ’’ Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, 1357–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), 1:xiv. Hoccleve’s first modern editor, F. J. Furnivall, spoke in similar terms...

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