following in Chaucer’s footsteps, however haltingly. Challenging the authority of Chaucer’s source, Henryson poses instead the problem of contemporaneous and competing versions. Scrutinizing the Chaucerian ethos of origin and continuity, he places the “other book” as a stumbling block to the uncritical acceptance of Chaucer’s own authority.
In this situation, there is much roughly akin to the “double consciousness” of colonial subjects discussed by writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Homi K. Bhabha. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha noted that the “poetic and political force” of such articulations “develops through a certain strategy of duplicity or doubling … which Lacan has elaborated as ‘the process of the gap’ within which the relations of subject to Other is produced” (76). Henryson’s poem intervenes within this “gap” between nations, literatures, and languages to assume his place within an international culture of English poetry while simultaneously reserving and cultivating a Scottish exceptionalism. For him, as for the later Scottish poet Gavin Douglas, poetic independence is manifested through articulations within the broader traditions of Latin humanism. The most crucial point of reference is not Chaucer, but rather the place of both Chaucer and Scots poets within the classical tradition—a relationship wherein Chaucer’s authority is destabilized and put in play in ways more “Chaucerian” than eulogistic responses could ever hope to achieve. Perhaps the clearest representation of this double consciousness exists in the picture Henryson sketched of his situation at the opening of the Testament. In it, meaning is a function of cultural difference working to define distinct literary cultures as well as their conjunctures. The cold winter night in April in Dunfermline drives the narrator from the temple of Venus and back to his private chamber. There, he reads the fifth book of Troilus, judges it both worthy and worthy of doubt, and drowsily imagines his own competing, complementary version already extant on the shelf alongside it—the one no more legitimate or authoritative than the other. The prologue’s narrator thus demurs in two ways richly symbolic of Henryson’s situation, staking out a poetic identity constructed by waning influences. Weathering the northern cold and the numbing of desire—conditions that correspond to a change in the prevailing literary