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climate—he establishes a perspective from which both Venus and her poet Chaucer are seen in a new light.
In this vein, my first chapter looks at Henryson’s deliberate fashioning of vernacular authorship and a poetic corpus according to the classical model of a tripartite career. I situate the supplement and the other two major works within Virgilian traditions of authorial biographies, the ideal poetic career, and the threefold poetic corpus. W. H. E. Sweet’s recent characterization of the Testament as “pointing toward an independent aesthetic and artistic consciousness of Scottish national identity” (49) has great merit, but my argument traces the invention of a Scottish vernacular authority and poetic identity back to its sources in Virgilian paradigms of authorship. Henryson plans and executes a vernacular poetic corpus (in obvious contrast with the expansive, inclusive corpus of Chaucer and the encyclopedic Lydgate), a trilogy of works rigorously faithful to the Virgilian career. The three major poems (The Moral Fables, Orpheus and Eurydice, and The Testament of Cresseid) compose the earliest attempt in the British Isles to structure a poetic oeuvre according to the humanistic rota Virgilii. This recognition allows one to reexamine the extent to which the three major poems are articulated in a particular sequence and to read these poems as a mutually illuminating series.
Similarly, chapter 2 takes up the ideas about tragedy implicit in the Testament, which departs radically from Chaucer’s Troilus. Henryson composes a distinctive bricolage in reconstructing tragic poetics from a wealth of sources, including Boethius, Isidore, Giovanni Boccaccio, John Lydgate, and Averroës’s Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics. I argue that the plot of the Testament is constructed according to Averroës’s notion of “composite imitation,” which turns on a reversal from the condemnation and punishment of vice to the praise of virtuous actions and people.
A more widespread albeit bizarre idea about ancient tragedy, extant in St. Jerome and often repeated in the later Middle Ages, was that it concerned prostitutes. Cresseid’s descent into the “hold-door trade” was a shocking and influential abruption in the Troy story, often