2
Let me return briefly to Stuart Hall’s theorizing of transcultural articulations to explore the temporality of such transactions. In his terms, the Testament is encoded into English literary tradition and into the conditions of harmony and discord between England and Scotland. Henryson deliberately encoded a Scottish supplement within English literature, thereby marshaling the resources of minor literature to reconstitute a major one. Within the Lancastrian regime, concerns about legitimate authority and paternity remained paramount, perhaps reflected as well in related attempts to emphasize lineage and legitimacy in the English Chaucerian tradition. Lydgate’s Troy Book, commissioned in 1412 by the future Henry V, reconciles the Chaucerian precedent with laudatio temporis acti. In its synthesis of Guido and Chaucer, the Troy Book embeds the love affair seamlessly within an encyclopedic, ethical history designed to delight and instruct a Lancastrian regime eager to consolidate and deploy the power of literature.21 The skepticism about worthy Chaucer’s authority came from outside this political configuration and occurred during the period when the Lancastrian line of kingship was broken. Perhaps one can begin to see the space and time of the supplement as an ideal situation for perceiving the invention of political and poetic traditions. But Henryson also articulates his Testament within the corpus of a Scottish author in a measured response to the inheritance of both classical and Chaucerian traditions. This encoding constitutes a reaction to political and cultural divisions within the discursive field, but it would, through the vagaries of transmission, be decoded in unpredictable and culturally inflected ways. As Roger Chartier recommends,
The remainder of this introduction traces some of the consequences for Henryson’s intercultural text through the course of literary history