as its place has been rearticulated within evolving configurations of national literatures and literary canons. In early modern Scotland, Henryson’s authorship of the supplement and the other major poems was commonly preserved, but the unity of his poetic corpus was not. Rather, it was disarticulated within a broader cultural project of anthologizing and preserving Scottish writing. In England, the conjunction with Chaucer’s poem was preserved and reproduced for centuries—a linkage that is absent from any surviving Scottish manuscript or early print—whereas English witnesses obscured (perhaps intentionally) the authorship and provenance of the Testament. The story of its dissemination in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is thus one of disarticulations and rearticulations within strategies of book production and canon formation in Scotland and England—in the former the recovery and preservation of a national literature (without the elevation of any particular author to preeminent status), and in the latter, a radically different though equally centripetal construction of Chaucer as the father of English poetry.22
In making an attempt to trace the situation of the Testament from insinuations in the poem through its inscriptions within printed books down to its present locations within changing canons and critical fashions, it is prudent to steer a course between nationalist and literary historical concerns, both then and now. Yet, the surviving textual history of the Testament tracks developments in Anglo-Scottish relations since the early sixteenth century to an almost miraculous degree. The poem first entered the canon of Chaucer’s works in William Thynne’s 1532 The Workes of Geffray Chaucer under the title “The pyteful and dolorous testament of fayre Creseyde,” though one should not overestimate the fortuitousness of this earliest surviving record or its place within an evolving Chaucer canon. True, the Testament is only one of twenty-three apocryphal items that Thynne included in his 1532 collection (there were twenty-eight by the 1542 edition), along with texts by Gower, John Clanvowe, Thomas Hoccleve, and Lydgate, but it is the only Scottish work so honored. Thynne’s anglicized text of the Testament was a late addition after the sheets for the book were already foliated and numbered. Why was there all this fuss and bother for one additional item?