Channeling the genius loci: Lydgate's and Milton's East Anglian spirit of England

This dissertation finds the medieval in the modern, and takes as its test case John Lydgate (1370-1451?) and John Milton (1608-74). Almost two centuries and the Protestant Reformation divide them, but both authors spent their formative scholastic years in East Anglia, an eccentric region of England distinguished by unique forms of lay and clerical piety and by a long tradition of heterodoxy and intellectual dissent. My project is the first to identify Lydgate's and Milton's characteristic East Anglian viewpoint, to analyze previously neglected evidence of Milton's reading Lydgate, and to establish direct material and thematic links between them. This regional focus resituates Lydgate's and Milton's texts within native traditions of political dissidence and religious tolerance. I balance a close reading of the local biases influencing Lydgate's and Milton's nation-building texts with an account of the history of a divided England from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. I draw from classical philosophy, early theology, history, and recent work in political theory and identity studies to expose the invariable tension between the timeless ideals of literature and the real-world conditions underlying its construction. I explore this productive dynamic of specific and universal through the genius loci, a trope that articulates an immortal authority even as it speaks to its particular time and place. This examination of the real complexities undermining the homogenous ideal of nationhood in medieval and early modern England complicates current disciplinary boundaries dividing the Middle Ages from the Renaissance.