adduced as evidence of Henryson’s stern, cruel nature, though he had it on no less an authority than Jerome that classical tragedies were about prostitutes.18 This question too becomes more complex the further one looks into it.
As Gretchen Mieszkowski demonstrated in “The Reputation of Criseyde, 1155–1500,” Henryson’s treatment of the heroine, far from being a random act of literary violence, reimagines Chaucer’s Criseyde in terms of the ambient misogyny in the medieval histories of Troy, linking the continuation of her story with the antifeminism of Benoît de Sainte-Maure and Guido delle Colonne . Yet, Henryson’s variant on this tradition is both crueler and kinder; it punishes Cresseid rather than merely chastising her transgressions, though it also opens a space within which she achieves tragic recognition and possibly even redemption.19 Again, this intercultural text is intimately concerned with the border it shares with Chaucer’s work, but it articulates this relationship within a broadly international perspective, one that both subsumes and subtends Chaucerian precedent.
Perhaps the central, enduring crux in the scholarship of Henryson’s poem concerns the representation of the heroine.20 Henryson ravishes Chaucer’s furtive Criseyde and exposes her to ridicule and retribution, though he also encourages forms of sympathy alien to Chaucer’s work. The Scottish poet’s concern with marginal, excluded, or victimized figures is part of what ties his three major works together, yet the wedding of sadism and sympathy within the Testament poses an especially troubling union. My third chapter addresses this crux by exploring the cultural roots of Henryson’s cruelty and his reformation of Cresseid in terms of the inquisitorial, sacrificial culture of late medieval Europe. Henryson adds to the inherited Trojan narratives Cresseid’s prostitution, blasphemy, and leprosy—a nettlesome invention that works to collapse historical differences entirely and by the end of the poem shockingly locates the heroine within a world indistinguishable from that of his readers. The articulation here harnesses the legalistic language of courtly love to an inquisitorial machine driven by increasing fears about contagious bodies and books.