Chaucer's "Wretched Engendering" and "An Holy Medytacion"

Abstract

First, the relations of the three texts should be clarified. It is a fact that the Meditation is indebted to the Latin verse De humana miseria tractatus, and this to Pope Innocent's prose treatise De contemptu mundi, but their dependence is not nearly so great as readers have been led to infer. To summarize the Tractatus, the poet's pleasure in nature leads him to reflections on the baseness of man and the vanity of this world, and this to an attack on the court of Rome. Only the section on the baseness and misery of man, i.e., only one-quarter of this 148-line piece, is translated or derived from DCM. The Meditation starts with pleasure in nature; this leads to self-abasement (about one-quarter of the 180-line poem), which the poet would escape through religious considerations. Only half the lines of the Meditation are translated more or less closely from the Tractatus, the other half being partly expansion, mostly straight innovation. The larger portion of what the Tractatus had translated from DCM is discarded by the English writer; only six lines of his Meditation (51, 59, 113-14, 119-20) are translation (at second hand) from DCM. About one (scattered) quarter of the poem is somewhat like Innocent's treatise; nothing in the other three quarters has any kind of resemblance to anything in it. We shall consider separately the two problems: (1) Is An holy medytacion Chaucer's Wretched engendering? and (2) Did Chaucer write An holy medytacion?