textual situations, and international literary relations as an ongoing negotiation between authorial design and the making of things such as canons, national literatures, and literary histories. Borrowing a term from Mary Louise Pratt, Situational Poetics traces the itineraries of the Testament of Cresseid as an “intercultural text” through a number of poetic, nationalist, and imperialist conjunctures. These bindings and unbindings are made within contact zones where “cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (4). Pratt calls this phenomenon “transculturation”—a term that can also be utilized to characterize the way that the Testament crosses and reaffirms cultural borders.
The physical Anglo-Scottish border staged in blatant ways the drama of contiguous countries, sovereign but unequal, cooperative and rebarbative—often simultaneously—as rival monarchies tried to reassert the Law of the Borders or to leverage the chronic instability of the region.6 International relations more generally alternated between diplomacy and challenges to sovereign authority: “auld enemies” negotiated treaties and marriages even as Edward IV demanded homage from James III and James IV entertained pretenders to the English throne. James I wrote glowing tributes to Chaucer and John Gower during or soon after his long incarceration as a political prisoner in England. Both he and his grandson, James III, were assassinated by rebellious Scottish magnates—James I for pursuing a costly war against the English and James III for pursuing an alliance with them. James III “happinit to be slane” (as the Scottish parliament cautiously phrased it) in 1488, or around the time Henryson probably wrote the Testament (qtd. in Macdougall 59). James II and James IV, the sons of these monarchs, died in battle against the English. Such tangled exchanges of international influence and antagonism neither determine nor are they of the same order as questions of poetic influence or literary traditions. Yet, as Priscilla Bawcutt notes, “the Border … was a highly permeable zone, across it flew arrows and bullets accompanied by verbal missiles.” Borders were also crossed for less provocative reasons, such as “exile, pilgrimage, marriage, trade and diplomacy” (“Crossing the Border” 59).7 G. Gregory Smith, an early editor of Henryson, claims that the sharp contraries in