Henryson, Robert | Julia Boffey (essay date March 1992)
Julia Boffey (essay date March 1992)
SOURCE: Boffey, Julia. “Lydgate, Henryson, and the Literary Testament.” Modern Language Quarterly 53, no. 1 (March 1992): 41-56.
[In the essay which follows, Boffey delineates some of the fifteenth-century conventions which are essential for a full appreciation of John Lydgate's Testament and Henryson's Testament of Cresseid.]
Literary experiment with the matter and form of the legal testament held a particular appeal for the Middle Ages, in part perhaps because it offered the opportunity of creating a text around an authenticating impulse similar to that built into the literary complaint or epistle: a testator, like a plaintiff or a correspondent, has some ostensible justification for generating a written document. Scholarly studies of the genre have variously attempted to trace its classical antecedents, to sort the surviving texts into related categories, and to examine their resemblances...
[The entire page is 7734 words long]
Navigate
