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Praise for Situational Poetics in Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid
“Massively informed both historically and theoretically, Professor Haydock’s searching study locates Henryson’s Testament squarely and understandably in the poet’s time and in our own. Where scholarship and anthologizing have often treated Henryson in passing or missed him entirely, Haydock shows how from the consideration of “genre, gender, and generations,” from concerns with scapegoating and persecution, and from tensions of “moral pathology” and poetic invigoration Cresseid emerges as a character of complex signification and lingering intensity. From an iconography of flowers and fertility, prostitution and divinity, and suffering and retribution comes a vision of a character and a poem deeply moving and richly human.”
––E. L. Risden, Professor, St. Norbert’s College
“Why do people read criticism of their classics? Probably to get a new picture of themselves thinking over time. An author they had formed a picture of in the distant past, in the hands of a reader other than themselves, is critically recast as the readers are recast too, both the early and the late! The book may prove a consequential re-envisioning of the entire Anglo-Scots fifteenth century, with all that entails. After this Henryson, James I, Dunbar, Douglas, and even Chaucer or Caxton will never again make the same kind of reductive—read “literary historical”—sense they have been making for at least the last century.”
––Stavros Deligiorgis, Professor Emeritus, University of Iowa