SOURCE: Wheatley, Edward. “Scholastic Commentary and Robert Henryson's Morall Fabillis: The Aesopic Fables.” Studies in Philology 91, no. 1 (1994): 70-99.

[In the following essay, Wheatley examines scholastic commentaries on fable collections available to Henryson that may have been influential in his composition of the Morall Fabillis.]

I

Modern critics have examined Robert Henryson's Morall Fabillis in relation to the sermons, popular literature, and political events of Henryson's day, but the fables have never been systematically compared to common educational texts, even though Henryson, a school-master, acknowledges the source for some of his fables as the classroom Aesop of his era. The Middle Scots poet took seven tales from one of the so-called “Romulus” collections, a group of sixty Latin verse fables probably written in the late twelfth century and generally attributed to Gualterus Anglicus (Walter of England).¹ This collection became popular enough to displace Avianus's fables as the curricular representative of the genre in European grammar schools, earning “Aesop” a place among the Auctores octo, the group of eight authors including Cato, Theodulus, and Alain de Lille.

Like most widely studied “pagan” texts during the Middle Ages, these Aesopic fables acquired scholastic commentaries. The 160 extant manuscripts of the fables and/or their commentaries² indicate that anyone in the medieval educational hierarchy, from schoolboys to highly learned adults, could attempt to pen a commentary: the surviving body of work extends from the charmingly childish to the highly learned. The more expert commentators typically wrote a paraphrase of each fable and then offered interpretations of the fable's meaning, sometimes leaving the interpretation on a social, earthly level, sometimes providing a Christian allegory, and sometimes doing both.

The most perceptive modern critic of Latin commentaries, Rita Copeland, has described the motivation for this kind of text as follows:

Latin exegetical practice in the Middle Ages carries the rhetorical force of hermeneia, or primary or productive discourse: it works to displace the original text, materially by paraphrase, and conceptually by reconstituting the argumentative structure of the text. … Latin commentary substitutes itself for the text in question, inserting itself into the auctoritas of that text, hence appropriating that authority, and to varying degrees performing in lieu of the text. The dynamic effect of exegesis is to achieve a certain difference with the source.³

Although Copeland focuses upon elevated philosophical texts (and highly educated commentators, for a schoolboy writing a commentary would hardly think of himself as appropriating the authority of “Aesop”), her remarks hold true at least for the most scholarly fable commentaries.

Indeed, fables were probably even more available for appropriation than any other texts in the Middle Ages, since one of the standard classroom practices from antiquity demanded paraphrase. Priscian's influential Praeexercitamina, a standard guide for medieval educational theory, suggested that students learn Aesopic fable plots and then retell them in abbreviated form (“modo breviter”) and/or lengthened form (“modo latius”); he reproduces one fable in each form.⁴ Thus educated medieval readers would have learned early in their schooling that fables existed in order to be rewritten. As a schoolmaster, Henryson must have presided over such student activity repeatedly, and, as we shall see, he certainly knew the commentaries that grew out of this activity.

The most popular commentaries associated with the Aesopic fables came to be held in almost as much esteem as the tales themselves. By Henryson's day, two branches of commentary on the fables had achieved such popularity that one or the other was nearly always printed with the fables. Probably written in the thirteenth century, the older branch, with the incipit “Grecia disciplinarum mater,” was generally published with the fables alone under the title Esopus moralizatus. A commentary written roughly a century later and beginning with the words “In principio huius libri” was most often published with the fables as part of the Auctores octo collection.⁵ These two commentaries were printed with the fables at least twenty-five times in several countries before 1500.⁶

In spite of the broad dissemination of not only these published commentaries but also many others in manuscripts, they have received practically no modern scholarly attention on their own, and very little in relation to vernacular fables derived from Walter's collection. Only Douglas Gray, in his book simply entitled Robert Henryson, has suggested connections between some of the author's fables and the allegories in the Esopus moralizatus and Auctores octo, but Gray devotes a mere three pages of his book to discussing similarities in subject matter (125-28). In this article I will examine the “Prologue,” moralitates, and some structural principles of the Aesopic fables in Henryson's Morall Fabillis in relation to the scholastic language, educational theory, and allegories in fable manuscripts and books available in the late fifteenth century. Many of the comparisons here are based on the Esopus moralizatus and Auctores octo commentaries, but I will also cite similarities between the Middle Scots fables and commentaries found only in manuscripts, especially BL MS Add. 11897, the commentary which is strikingly similar to much of Henryson's work.

Henryson's project, which uses both beast-epic and Aesopic fable as primary sources along with numerous works of Christian and pagan auctoritas as secondary sources, is the most scholarly vernacular fable collection to emerge during the Middle Ages. The Morall Fabillis includes the entire spectrum of figuration and allegory, from homiletic morals which leave the relation between a character and its moral role undefined to full allegorization in which, to pervert a metaphor, no stone is left unturned into something else. In a sense, this collection is a compendium of approaches and attitudes toward fable, here expanded to include the sister genre of beast-epic. (Although the moralitates of Henryson's beast-epic fables [Fables III, IV, V, and IX, X, and XI] are structurally indebted to scholastic fable commentaries, they will not be discussed here.)

However, the variety of subject matter and interpretative technique has proved disconcerting to critics unfamiliar with the diversity which typifies the scholastic fable tradition. A substantial number of critics in the 1950s, 1960s, and even the 1970s found Henryson's changes of interpretative mode so opaque that they chose not to read the narratives and moralitates as integrated,⁷ a baby-and-bathwater rejection which neither elucidates Henryson's work nor shows an understanding of fable as a genre. Wisely, most Henryson critics in the past three decades have followed Denton Fox's advice in his 1962 article “Henryson's Fables,”⁸ that the two parts of each fable should be considered together, and that the collection should be viewed as a unified work of literature rather than a random compilation.

Nevertheless, curiosity and confusion about Henryson's moral messages remain, even in the work of the sensitive critic Douglas Gray, who calls the moralitates “selective and arbitrary” (124). On one level, this judgment is irrefutable: why Henryson chose to apply one moralitas and not another to a certain fable was entirely his own decision. By comparing his work to scholastic fable commentaries, however, we can see clearly that Henryson viewed his own work as part of a tradition (even though the very tradition had long been based on selectivity and arbitrariness).

In the following discussion I will differentiate between social and allegorical readings of the fables. A social reading entails generalized social roles, with animals representing good or bad people, powerful or weak people, etc.; these demand little rethinking of the narrative. Allegorical readings call upon the reader to think the fable into a different spiritual plane, and on the whole such interpretations are much more detailed than social readings.

II

In the prologue to the Morall Fabillis Henryson draws upon two parts of the standard Latin fable curriculum: Walter of England's verse prologue and several of the accessus, or scholastic introductions, which accompanied the Latin collection in manuscripts and books. These sources are combined with common fable theory in such a way that Henryson prepares his audience for a vernacular collection of broader concern than any of its sources.

The tone of Henryson's prologue is instructive, seeking to justify the project in terms of scholastic endeavor:

Thocht feinȝeit fabils of ald poetre
Be not al grunded vpon truth, ȝit than,
Thair polite termes of sweit rhetore
Richt plesand ar vnto the eir of man;
And als the caus quhy thay first began
Wes to repreif the of thi misleuing,
O man, be figure of ane vther thing.

(1-7)⁹

Here Henryson criticizes the genre because of its basic falsity, a criticism which could have reached him through patristic writings,¹⁰ but he immediately negates that criticism by emphasizing the importance of figuration. The word “caus” in line 5 would have reminded Henryson's contemporaries of the Aristotelian form of scholastic introduction;¹¹ indeed, this stanza may represent an adaptation of the “causa materialis” which the accessus to the Esopus moralizatus gives for Walter's collection, “Causa materialis vel subiectum huius libri est sermo fabulosus in respectu ad vertutes morales.”

While the horticultural imagery in the prologue's second stanza is taken directly from Walter's prologue,¹² it is noteworthy that although Walter speaks metaphorically of himself as a gardener tending the growth of his rhetorical flowers, Henryson's narrator distances himself from verbal horticulture through a simile; poetry, “in lyke maner” (8) to a garden bringing forth flowers and grain, has “ane morall sweit sentence” (12). The shift from first-person metaphor to depersonalized simile serves two purposes. First, it separates Henryson's own poetic activity from that of the original cultivator, Aesop/Walter. Our narrator can compare himself to the auctor but cannot presume to play the same part as the master of the genre. Second, this distancing simile frees our narrator for another role, as we shall see.

The next stanza, a justification for mixing pleasure and instruction which is as indebted to Walter as it is to Horace, closes with Henryson's quotation of the second line of Walter's prologue, “Dulcius arrident seria picta iocis” (line 28). To medieval readers, this verse was doubtless familiar enough to serve as a clear identifier of the collection which Henryson was “translating.” The line presents one of Walter's justifications for the genre in which he writes, but Henryson apparently places it here in order to prepare his audience for what is to follow: a citation of the “serious thing” inherent in a traditional modesty topos, but adorned with the pleasantries of some unexpected role-playing on the part of the narrator. This passage initially appears to be a light-hearted, satirical depiction of the traditional scholastic use of fables, but comparison with scholastic texts brings out its darker aspects. The poet writes of Aesop:

Of this poete, my maisteris, with ȝour leif,
Submitting me to ȝour correctioun,
In mother toung, of Latyng, I wald preif
To mak ane maner of translatioun—
Nocht of my self, for vane presumptioun,
Bot be requeist and precept of ane lord,
Of quhome the name it neidis not record.

Superficially Henryson's modesty topos seems quite traditional, but a closer examination of the stanza reveals unique aspects of the author's narratorial self-creation. One change is signaled by the word “maisteris,” a term appropriate to the classroom.¹³ In asking leave of his masters to begin his translation, the narrator places himself in the role of a student speaking to his teachers.

While the translation of fables was an age-old classroom exercise, the satirical edge of this passage becomes clearer in light of the fact that translation myths were also part of the standard scholastic introductions to Walter of England's fables. The Esopus moralizatus tells us that the emperor Romulus ordered the fables translated into Latin because he wanted his sons to be instructed by them, though no translator is named. The Auctores octo commentary first credits Socrates with a translation ordered by Emperor Theodosius, but later states that “magister Romulus” undertook the work at the behest of the emperor Tiberius. In these prologues, great care is taken to mention the name of the patron who has requested the translation, so that his commission will redound eternally to his greater glory. Henryson, on the other hand, leaves his readers doubting whether his narrator really has been commissioned, for surely someone submitting his work for the consideration of “maisteris” would not be qualified to undertake a translation for a lord.

But we should examine the passage yet again. Henryson's narrator brings into play a sin, “vane presumptioun,” which will not taint his translation, and then tells us that he need not name the lord by whose precept he is working. Henryson here could be hinting at the ways in which his Christian fable collection will differ from earlier texts: his work need not glorify an earthly lord, because it is written to glorify the spiritual one. Through this calculated ambiguity, Henryson prepares his readers for the fact that his collection will examine both the relationship between earthly nobles and their subjects, and that between the heavenly lord and his creatures.

The narrator further denigrates his own abilities in lines 36-42, which on their own seem a wholly traditional disclaimer of verbal skills:

In hamelie language and in termes rude
Me neidis wryte, for quhy of eloquence
Nor rethorike, I never vnderstude.
Thairfoir meiklie I pray ȝour reuerence,
Gif ȝe find ocht that throw my negligence
Be deminute, or ȝit superfluous,
Correct it at ȝour willis gratious.

(29-42)

Here Henryson satirizes both the dictates of Priscian's Praeexercitamina and his own narrator. The narrator's self-declared lack of rhetorical talent directly contradicts the generic requirement of fable cited in the prologue's first stanza, providing further evidence that he is ill-qualified for the task. Rhetorical sweetness, the genre's primary raison d'être, must pave the way if instruction in proper living is to follow. Furthermore, to adhere to Priscian's pedagogical model, a student was required to make a fable either “deminute” or “superfluous”; the narrator's request for correction expresses fears based upon scholastic practice, though even at the outset of his project, Henryson must have known that the “superfluities” added to the original fables would be his stamp upon them.

Of course Henryson gives his narrator the lie not only by means of his elegant rhyme royal stanzaic form but also in the very terms expressing inarticulateness: this stanza includes no fewer than seven latinisms, betokening an elevated rhetorical style.¹⁴ Indeed, Bengt Ellenberger has pointed out that the prologue contains 2.6 times the average number of latinisms per line of the Morall Fabillis as a whole. Thus Henryson paints the narrator as a man who is classically educated, as any fabulist should be, but who wears his learning lightly.

In the next two stanzas, Henryson clarifies the balance that he is attempting to strike between the fables' classroom role and their value as exempla. The narrator attributes to Aesop/Walter a far more ambitious agenda for fables than the source itself posits:

My author in his fabillis tellis how
That brutal beistis spak and vnderstude,
And to gude purpois dispute and argow,
Ane sillogisme propone, and eik conclude;
Putting exempill and similitude
How mony men in operatioun
Ar like to beistis in conditioun.

(43-49)

Here Henryson plays brilliantly upon Priscian's dictates that fables be rhetorical models for school children, the curricular role for which Walter probably wrote his Latin fables. Henryson has raised the curricular stakes by writing forms of academic discourse into the fables rather than simply allowing those forms to be the subject of that discourse. But if this idea begins as a witty satire of scholarly disputatio, it is balanced by a dead-serious indictment of sinfulness in lines 47-49 and the following stanza:

Ne merveill is, ane man be lyke ane beist,
Quhilk lufis ay carnall and foull delyte,
That schame can not him renȝe nor arreist,
Bot takis all the lust and appetyte,
Quhilk throw custum and the daylie ryte
Syne in the mynd sa fast is radicate
That he in brutal beist is transformate.

(50-56)

In his edition's notes to these lines, Fox cites the standard scriptural passages in which sinful men are compared to irrational beasts, 2 Peter 2:9 ff., and Jude 10, but while these verses are certainly part of the broader background of Henryson's stanza, the idea of the incongruity of humans acting in beastly fashion could also have been borrowed from this passage of the Auctores octo introduction:

Magister Aesopus de civitate Atheniensi, auctor huius libri, volens omnes homines communiter informare quid agere et quid vitare debeant, hoc opus composuit in quo fingit bruta irrationalia animalia et inanimata loqui nobis; per hoc inconveniens docet nos cavere cavenda et sectari sectanda: nam fingit gallum loqui et lupum, ut patet in littera; hoc est totum figurative: ut id quod minus videtur inesse inest et id quod magis.

This passage also shares with the final stanza of Henryson's prologue the emphasis on the figurative nature of the poet's project (“Esope … be figure wrait his buke,” 57, 59).

By the end of his introduction, then, Henryson has begun to sketch the role of his narrator in the collection: that of a learned but modest man playing the student before his superiors, while addressing spiritual concerns superior to his listeners. He has touched upon his familiarity with the classroom use of fables, but he will be taking them beyond those traditional confines.

Like Walter's first fable, Henryson's “The Cock and the Jasp” tells of an ignorant creature who cannot see beyond extrinsic beauty to intrinsic value. Having found a jasper while scraping for food in the dunghill, the cock uses rather high rhetorical style to tell the stone that it is useless to him. He concludes:

“Quhar suld thow mak thy habitatioun?
Quhar suld thow duell, bot in ane royall tour?
Quhar suld thow sit, bot on ane kingis croun
Exalt in worschip and in grit honour?
Rise, gentill Iasp, of all stanis the flour,
Out of this fen, and pas quhar thow suld be;
Thow ganis not for me, nor I for the.”

(106-12)

Then the narrator interjects a self-conscious first-person sentence to point out that he intends to explain the tale's moral:

Bot of the inward sentence and intent
Of this fabill, as myne author dois write,
I sall reheirs in rude and hamelie dite.

(117-19)

Here the narrator's change of tone and person is reminiscent of Walter's original moralitas, in which he uncharacteristically addresses the cock and the jasper, telling them what they represent (“Tu Gallo stolidum, tu iaspide pulchra sophye / Dona notes; stolido nil sapit ista seges”). In each case, the narrator apparently wants to guide his readers through the first interpretation. Henryson's transition from fable to moralitas offers an implicit warning, however, in that the narrator intends to write in the low style—“rude and hamelie dite”—unlike the cock, whose high-flown rhetoric masks his foolishness. Here Henryson points out that rhetorical eloquence does not have a monopoly on wisdom, and by extension, that lesser genres such as the fable need not be ineloquent.

The moralitas begins with a stanza about the seven properties of jasper, information obviously borrowed from a lapidary. This stanza confuses Henryson's modern editor, Denton Fox, who writes,

It seems very possible that [this] is a fragment which Henryson intended to cancel or rewrite. This stanza treats the jasp as a magical stone and deals exclusively with earthly things, while in the following stanzas Henryson makes the jasp into a figure of wisdom and contrasts it to ‘ony eirthly thing’

(n., line 130)

Even though he finds no aesthetic justification for the passage, Fox goes on to cite several English lapidaries (198).

Actually, one of the best-known lapidaries in the Middle Ages had been associated with Walter's fables at least half a century before Henryson rewrote them. In BL MS Add. 11897, a late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century German manuscript of Walter's fables with a highly learned commentary, the scribe has written the following lines in the margin alongside the fable of the cock and the jasp: “In lapidaris dicitur, ‘jaspidis esse decem species septemque feruntur. Caste portatus fugat et febres et iidropes. Optimus in viridi translucentique colore’” (2r). These lines are taken from the verse lapidary De Gemmis, romantically attributed to Evax, King of Arabia, who describes the jewel under the fourth heading in his work.¹⁵

BL MS Add. 11897 was copied during the lifetime of John Lydgate, who rewrote seven of Walter's fables in English as Isopes Fabules. Although his acquaintance with this specific manuscript seems highly unlikely, he, too, associated Evax's lapidary with Walter's first fable. Lydgate has the cock address the jewel as follows:

“Evax to the yeveþ praysyng manyfolde,
Whos lapydary bereþ opynly wytnesse,
Geyn sorow & woe þou bryngest in gladnesse.
The best iacyncte in Ethiope ys founde
And ys of colour lyke the saphyre ynde,
Comforteþ man þat ly in prison bounde,
Makeþ men strong & hardy of hys kynde,
Contract synewes þe iacyncte doþ unbynde.

(152-59)¹⁶

Since Lydgate's fables survive in only two manuscripts, both of which are miscellanies of his poetry, we cannot assume that the tales reached a large audience; therefore, Henryson's knowledge of them seems only slightly more plausible than his knowledge of the German manuscript. Regardless of whether he was acquainted with either of these texts, their very existence suggests that Henryson probably knew of some precedent for the use of lapidaries in relation to this particular fable. Furthermore, Henryson may have been echoing Evax's verse, “Et tutamentum portanti creditur esse,” in the following verses about the jasp:

It makis ane man stark and victorious
Preseruis als fra cacis perrillous;
Quha hes this stane sall haue gud hap to speid,
Of fyre not fallis him neidis not to dreid.

(123-26)

Henryson's next stanza contrasts the properties which God has given the jasper and those which the fabulist gives it:

This gentill iasp, richt different of hew,
Betakinnis perfite prudence and cunning,
Ornate with mony deidis of vertew,
Mair excellent than ony eirthly thing,
Quhilk makis men in honour ay to ring,
Happie, and stark to haif the victorie
Of all vicis and spirituall enemie.

(127-33)

Whether the comparison with “only eirthly thing” describes the jasper, as Fox believes, or virtue, as I think more likely, must be left open to debate, but the fact that the subject leads to victory over vices is a mark in favor of the latter interpretation. We should note, too, that a jasper representing virtue would help people to triumph over their “spirituall enemie”; Henryson's jewel leads to a spiritual fortitude absent from Walter's jasper, which is symbolic of moral wisdom.

At this point the jasper is subsumed in the allegorical interpretation until the author has described the cock:

This cok, desyrand mair the sempill corne
Than ony iasp, may till ane fule be peir,
Quhilk at science makis bot ane moik and scorne,
And na gude can; als lytill will he leir—
His hart wammillis wyse argumentis to heir,
As dois ane sow to quhome men for the nanis
In hir draf troich wald saw the precious stanis.

(141-47)

The closing lines of this stanza, which Fox identifies as an obvious reference to Matthew 7:6, “Neither cast ye your pearls before swine …,” also reflect the Auctores octo commentary. In the plot summary of the fable, that commentator initially refers to the stone not as “iaspis,” but only as “margarita.” In his moralization he writes, “Per margaritam (intellige) sapientem.” Just as Henryson alludes to the pearl of great price but returns to the jasper at the end of his moralitas (155 ff.), the Auctores octo commentator changes his pearl back to a jasper at the end of his moralization, where he gives the etymology for the word “iaspis.”¹⁷

In general, fable commentaries call several forms of interpretation into play early in Walter's collection, thus familiarizing readers with several avenues of interpretative pursuit, any of which might be followed in subsequent fables. In the moralitas of “The Cock and the Jasp,” Henryson appears to follow the example of scholastic commentators by giving several kinds of interpretation to the first fable in his collection: he uses more than one type of allegory, in this case the natural (the lapidary), the social (the earthly fool), and the biblical (the allusion to the pearl before swine). What to modern readers appears a confusing variety of allegorical forms created by Henryson may have suggested to medieval readers the multiplicity of interpretative forms available for this genre.

Henryson's fable of the city mouse and the country mouse, a lengthy adaptation of Walter's twelfth fable, is not as clearly indebted to scholastic commentaries as most of Henryson's other fables, perhaps because the commentaries generally offer only social interpretations similar to that provided in the verse fable itself. The Auctores octo commentary reads the country mouse as “bonos homines spirituales, de securitate semper letos,” and the city mouse as “pravos homines et seculares semper gaudentes tam de illecebris quam de utilitate.” The BL MS Add. 11897 commentator repeats this interpretation.

Henryson includes only a vague echo of this reading when writing the country mouse's farewell, after the cat has interrupted dinner; this speech contains the only mention of God by either of the characters: “Almichtie God keip me fra sic ane feist” (350).

In the moralitas, Henryson's passing mention of “sickernes (with small possessioun)” (380) reflects the commentary's use of securitate quoted above, but this is the only word implying a debt to the commentary.

Henryson concludes his moralitas by citing a biblical authority:

And Solomon sayis, gif that thow will reid,
‘Vnder the heuin I can not better se
Than ay be blyith and leif in honestie.’
Quhairfoir I may conclude be this ressoun:
Of eirthly ioy it beiris maist degre,
Blyithnes in hart, with small possessioun.

(391-96)

Although this scriptural citation itself has not been identified with any certainty, Henryson's use of Solomon as auctor in his moral is clearly traceable to the commentary tradition, where he is quoted repeatedly in relation to moralitates. In the Auctores octo, Solomon is quoted four times, one instance of which appears in the comment on the fable following that of the two mice.¹⁸

After the first triad of beast-epic fables, Henryson returns to Walter's collection for “The Sheep and the Dog,” which tells of a canine who falsely accuses a sheep of being in debt to him and who bribes false witnesses to support his claim in court. Perhaps to mark the change from one kind of source to another, this fable begins with an approximate translation of the standard introduction to comments in the Esopus moralizatus, “Hic autor ponit aliam fabulam”; Henryson writes “Esope ane taill puttis in memorie …” (1146), a phrase which must have reminded many of his contemporaries of scholastic commentary.

Less a generalized scholastic fable than a pointed satire on legal corruption, Henryson's version of the narrative devotes as much attention to the victimized sheep as to the corrupt court proceedings. In rewriting the fable slightly as a satire of legal injustice, Henryson rejects the spiritual allegory available to him in scholastic commentaries, where the trial is allegorically recast as divine judgment of a human soul. Instead, Henryson opts for detailed social figuration: the sheep represents “the figure / Of pure commounis” (1258-59), the wolf is likened to “ane schiref stout” (1265), and the raven represents “ane fals crownair” (1272). Here Henryson is obviously not writing a fable general enough for all times and places: these are medieval characters in a contemporary situation.

Among the three roles, figurative specificity shifts strangely. The role of a poor common person comes up quite often in fable commentaries as “paupes” or “impotens,” but a definite role for a powerful person almost never appears; these remain at the general level of “potentes” or “tyranni.”¹⁹ Evidently willing to sacrifice generality at the altar of satire, Henryson goes against the precedent set by scholastic commentary when he assigns the wolf and the crow specific roles within the legal system. Perhaps because of this alteration, Henryson introduces the figurative roles differently. The sheep “may present the figure / Of pure commounis” (1258-59); the use of “may” is standard for the author as he introduces figurative roles. However, turning to the other two animals, he writes, “This volf I likkin to ane schiref stout” (1265), and “This rauin I likkin to ane fals crownair” (1272). The narrator's personal intervention here might betray Henryson's discomfort with the substantial change which he makes to his source and to standard figurative treatments of the genre as a whole.

Once the figurative identities have been established, the sheep speaks up again in the middle of the moralitas, an interruption which strikes the modern reader as bizarre. In spite of our expectations, this kind of direct address in the moralitas had been established in scholastic commentaries before Henryson's day. For example, in the “Allegoria” section of the Auctores octo comment on Fable XXXV, “De lupo et capite,” this sentence concludes the comment: “Lupus, id est deus, ait, O vos decores depicti huius mundi hominis, sed heu, sine voce, id est gratia mea et regno patris mei.” This kind of direct address must be based on the fact that the statement is general enough to fit the wolf as well as God (or in this case, Christ); in fact, only the first half of the wolf/deity's statement strikes the appropriate level of generality.²⁰ In Henryson's fable of the sheep and the dog, the animal's plaint is as appropriate to poor people as to himself, to the degree that he becomes confused about his own identity: the group on whose behalf he complains is “we pure pepill” (1317).

But Henryson's changes to the scholastic model are aesthetically significant, for the sheep's plaint is not a mere repetition of what he has said in the fable. There, he has presented his case formally, using legal terminology. In the moralitas he bemoans his unjust sentence as symptomatic of the evil in the upper strata of society:

“Se how this cursit syn of couetice
Exylit hes baith lufe, lawtie, and law.
Now few or nane will execute iustice,
In falt of quhome, the pure man is ouerthraw.
The veritie, suppois the iugis knaw,
Thay ar so blindit with affectioun,
But dreid, for meid, thay thoill the richt go doun.
“Seis thow not, lord, this warld ouerturnit is,
As quha wald change gude gold in leid or tyn?
The pure is peillit, the lord may do na mis,
And simonie is haldin for na syn.
Now is he blyith with okker maist may wyn;
Gentrice is slane, and pietie is ago.
Allace, gude lord, quhy tholis thow it so?

(1300-13)

In effect, this declamation, which continues to the end of the moralitas, is as truthful and relevant to the sheep's case as the speech which he makes before the court (1187-1201), and it could certainly have found a place in the fable narrative itself. Alternatively, the lines in the moralitas could have been left in the voice of the narrator, and the moral lesson which they teach would have been much the same. However, Henryson has marginalized the plaint, making the sheep the commentator on the fable in which he appears. This structure suggests that the universe defined by the fable is too corrupt to encompass certain truths: they must be marginalized in a world which is “ouerturnit,” i.e., upside-down. By the same token, the structure gives the sheep's voice greater authority, since it inhabits the moralitas, where the greatest wisdom of a fable must lie.

The exclusion of truth from its proper realm remains an important theme in the framing narrative of Fable VII, “The Lion and the Mouse,” in which the narrator dreams that Aesop visits him and grudgingly tells a fable. This frame is another element in Henryson's fables that has bothered modern critics, notably Dieter Mehl, whose article “Robert Henryson's Moral Fables as Experiments in Didactic Narrative” includes perceptive readings of the lessons Henryson teaches.²¹ However, because Mehl is unfamiliar with the variety of didactic experiments in scholastic fables and commentaries, he believes that the frame undermines the possibility of unity among Henryson's fables as a collection. Mehl writes,

The originality of the frame makes it very unlikely that the poet wrote the fable as part of a collection; to justify its place in the Bassandyne-order by pointing out that it stands exactly in the centre of the thirteen tales is tempting, but does not explain the individual character of the tale. The arrangement is more likely to be the afterthought of some ingenious compiler, but it should not be made the basis for elaborate theorizing about the structure of the whole collection.

(87)

Pace Mehl, the fables of Walter of England, undeniably a collection, include two framing narratives, in Fable VII, “De femina et fure,” and Fable L, “De patre et filio.” In both of these, a wise man faced with a social problem (a neighborhood potentially overrun by thieves, and a wayward son, respectively) attempts to change his listeners' behavior by telling a relevant fable. We cannot deny the possibility, then, that Henryson could have conceived of his framed fable as one in a collection.

Furthermore, extant scholastic commentaries include at least one example of a commentator sketching a framing narrative in which Aesop himself tells a fable, as he does in Henryson's work. Walter's twenty-first fable, “De Terra Atheniensium Petente Regem,” was apparently written to incorporate two fables, though some manuscripts divide them. The first narrative accords with the title above, and the second tells an analogous story of frogs begging Jupiter for a ruler, only to be given first an inert log and then a hungry hydra. The fable as a whole begins with a sort of promythion, two lines describing why fables were first created (“Fabula nata sequi mores et pingere vitam, / Tangit quod fugias, quodque sequaris iter” [Hervieux 325]), and the lines that serve as a transition between the two sections mention Aesop himself (“Vrbem triste iugum querula cervige gerentem / Esopus tetigit, consona verba movens” [Hervieux 326]). In MS II. 216 of the Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea in Ferrara, the commentator believed the two stories were one fable, the first describing the historical situation in which Aesop himself came forward to tell the exemplum of the unfortunate frogs (84v). That Aesop should tell both that commentator's version of the tale and Henryson's fable of the lion and the mouse is coincidental in subject matter as well, for both narratives are concerned with the need for just government.

As is the case with MS Add. 11897, the Ferrara text predates Henryson's Fabillis by about a century, but no clear link can be drawn between it and his fables; even so, the inspiration for having Aesop tell a fable may have been available to him through another commentary.

While these fables or a commentary may have provided structural models for Henryson, he carried the idea of a framing narrative much further, not least in complicating the identity of Aesop by making him a Christian born in Rome and therefore deserving an authority different from that belonging to pagans. His first words to the dreamer are “God speid, my sone” (1363), and he says that he dwells in heaven (1374). But Aesop's Christianity is tinged with despair, as he betrays when replying to the dreamer's request for a fable:

Schaikand his heid, he said, “My sone, lat be,
For quhat is it worth to tell ane fenȝeit taill,
Quhen haly preiching may na thing auaill?
“Now in this warld me think richt few or nane
To Goddis word that hes deuotioun;
The eir is deif, the hart is hard as stane;
Now oppin sin without correctioun,
The e inclynand to the eirth ay doun.
Sa roustit is the warld with canker blak
That now my taillis may lytill succour mak.”

(1388-97)

Why would Henryson have decided to make Aesop Christian? Pagan authors, too, deserved respect, especially when their work was given the Christian meaning that not only Henryson but also scholastic commentators gave to Walter's fables. One explanation for the change of religion is that Henryson extrapolated it from a scholastic commentary. The accessus of neither the Esopus moralizatus nor the Auctores octo states that Aesop was a pagan, and in the latter work, the fables appear alongside several clearly Christian works including the Facetus, De Contemptu Mundi, Tobias, and the Floretus.

Aesop's Christianity lends credence to his assertion that “haly preiching” is no longer efficacious. While the narrator does not go so far as to disagree with Aesop's appraisal, he persists in requesting a fable, asking, “Quha wait nor I may leir and beir away / Sum thing thairby heirefter may auaill?” (1402-3). Vague as it is, this rebuttal persuades Aesop to begin recounting the fable of the lion and the mouse.

The moralitas which Aesop gives the fable is purely social, tacitly acknowledging that the fable is no sermon. The lion represents royalty, and the mouse the common people. In his closest brush with allegory, Aesop makes the forest stand for “the warld and his prosperitie, / As fals plesance, myngit with cair repleit” (1582-83). In one sense this role represents only an allegorical synecdoche based on place: the part represents the whole. However, the religious connotations of “the warld and his prosperitie” give the moralization a different twist, one which is anticipated in MS Ambrosiana I. 85 supra, copied by Johannes Brixianus (i.e., of Brescia) in 1415. Like Henryson's Aesop, he states that the lion and the mouse represent earthly figures (“homo pius” and “homo paupertas”), but the forest represents “this world” (“per silvam habemus istam mundum”); the commentator has chosen the demonstrative adjective with slightly pejorative overtones, instead of the more neutral “hic.” He and Henryson's narrator share the medieval Christian contempt for that which is purely worldly, a widely available sentiment which presumably teachers would want to inculcate in their pupils at an early stage.

The final stanza of the fable returns us to the dream vision, in which Aesop bids farewell to the dreamer:

Quhen this wes said, quod Esope, “My fair child,
Perswaid the kirkmen ythandly to pray
That tressoun of this cuntrie be exyld,
And iustice regne, and lordis keip thair fay
Vnto thair souerane lord baith nycht and day.”
And with that word he vanist and I woke;
Syne throw the schaw my iourney hamewart tuke.

(1615-21)

Aesop basically urges the narrator to give a sermon to churchmen, inasmuch as a sermon should partly be a persuasion to prayer, but again Henryson colors Aesop's message with despair; instead of exhorting the narrator to preach to the lords who are apparently close to losing faith in their leader, Aesop tells him to preach to the clergy, as if preaching to the nobility were doomed to failure.

A. C. Spearing is correct to point out that this fable and its framing narrative are both structurally and inspirationally central to the Morall Fabillis.²² I would add to his theory of centrality that the fable also delineates the central problem which Henryson as a poet confronts both in the “Prologue” and here: how to take a pagan fable based on social figuration and give it religious meaning. Even as a Christian, Aesop seems unable to bridge this gap, leaving the narrator with a challenge not to tell a fable but to preach. Of course scholastic fable allegory links these kinds of discourse, and significantly, both of the direct borrowings from commentaries occur after this point in Henryson's collection, as we shall see below.

If the fable of the lion and the mouse questions the efficacy of preaching, that question is given a bleak answer in the following fable, “The Preaching of the Swallow.” In fact, the fable opens with a kind of sermon on God's omnipotence as evidenced by nature and the seasons. This encomium serves as a transition to the fable narrative, but at fifteen stanzas, it is much longer than necessary if Henryson, a poet capable of impressive verbal economy, were not emphasizing its homiletic aims. Thus, by the time we reach the preaching swallow himself, we see similarities between the bird and the narrator.

Both the narrator and the swallow embellish their sermons with quotations from curricular auctores: the narrator cites Aristotle's Metaphysics in line 1636, and the swallow has recourse to half of one of the distichs of Cato in line 1754. Modern readers might associate the use of such auctoritates with Chaucer and The Nun's Priest's Tale, where the presence of a plethora of authoritative aphorisms is clearly satirical, in keeping with the rest of the tale; therefore we might infer that Henryson simply did not understand Chaucer's intention and consequently thought that such elevated auctores could be linked to lowly fables even when the tone of the work is serious. In fact, the idea of associating auctoritates and fables belonged to neither Chaucer nor Henryson, but scholastic commentary. Biblioteca Marciana MS 4658 quotes no fewer than 22 auctoritates in its fable commentary, and BL MS Add. 11897 no fewer than 37. Aristotle and Cato are cited in both manuscripts (and in the latter, complete or partial distichs are reproduced twelve times). Thus while the modern reader might be conditioned to feel a certain disjuncture of tone between Aesop and Aristotle, educated medieval readers would not have responded in the same way.

In commentaries written or printed in several countries during the century before Henryson wrote, the scholastic allegories for this fable are remarkably similar to each other and to Henryson's moralitas: the fabulist's debt to scholastic fable commentary is far clearer than has been acknowledged.

The Esopus moralizatus commentary as published by Heinrich Quentell in Cologne in 1489 gives the following allegorization after the summary of the fable's plot:

Allegorice per aves intelligere possumus peccatores, per hyrundinem vero spirituales, qui sepe ammonent peccatores ut desistant et abstineant a peccatis. Sed peccatores, spirituales ammonitiones spernentes, tandem per rethia capiuntur et eterno igni traduntur.

(Fable XX)

This is one of only nine spiritual allegories among the sixty fable interpretations in this commentary.

The Auctores octo commentary printed by Jehan de Vingle in Lyon in 1495 summarizes the plot and then turns to this allegory:

Allegoria: tu debes insudare bonis operibus, ne dyabolus te seducat ab eis. Per aves intelligimus peccatores, per irundinem spirituales qui semper monent eos ut se abstineant; illi vero respuentes monitionem, venit dyabolus et rapit per rhetia, id est per opera mala et deducit eos ad infernum.

(Fable 20, Fabularum Esopi)

Because BL MS Add. 11897 differs from the printed commentaries in lacking plot summaries, its allegorical interpretation includes more details of setting and plot than do the other comments. The allegorizer offers spiritual meanings for nearly every aspect of the story:

Allegoria: per yrundinem intellige spiritualem praedicatorem qui a(d)monet certas aves, id est homines, ut evellant linum, id est peccatum maximum cordis seu cogitationis que habent se, et seminaria aliorum peccatorum de agro cordis sui, ne agricola, id est dyabolus, ex eisdem diversa rethia, id est diversas temptationes quibus solet decipere homines, faciat. Sed ipsi homines consilium predicatorum spernentes sinunt crescat linum, id est peccata ex quibus dyabolus texit rethe. Quando illa capiant illos ducendo eos in consuetudinem peccandi et tandem reddens obstinatos in peccatis et finaliter impenitentes, ducit ipsos ad penas inferni eternales.

(8v)

Although this keenly detailed allegorization may exist in only one manuscript, we shall see that it has more in common with Henryson's moralitas than does either of the comments from incunables, earlier editions of which Henryson was far more likely to have known.

Allegories which interpret the swallow as a religious person or preacher, the other birds as sinners, and usually the man as the devil also appear in a large number of late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century manuscripts in libraries throughout Europe.²³

Following the first stanza of the moralitas of “The Preaching of the Swallow,” in which the poet eulogizes Aesop for the “moral edificatioun” inherent in his fables, the narrator states that the tale has “ane sentence according to ressoun” (1893-94). This gratuitous statement, unique among his fables, could be the poet's acknowledgment that the scholastic allegories associated with the fable are unusually uniform. The reason for this uniformity may not be far to seek: the figure of the bird-catcher was conventionally read as symbolic of the devil,²⁴ the interpretation which Henryson reproduces:

This carll and bond, of gentrice spoliate,
Sawand this calf, thir small birdis to sla,
It is the feind, quhilk fra the angelike state,
Exylit is, as fals apostata,
Quhilk day and nycht weryis not for to ga,
Sawand poysoun and mony wickit thocht
In mannis saull, quhilk Christ full deir hes bocht.

(1895-1901)

The seed sown “in mannis saul” is substantially similar to that sown in the heart of sinners, mentioned in BL MS Add. 11897. That manuscript also emphasizes “consuetudinem peccandi,” vocabulary duplicated in Henryson's next stanza:

Ressoun is blindit with affectioun,
And carnall lust grouis full grene and gay,
Throw consuetude hantit from day to day.

(1905-7)

The narrator goes on to tell us that wicked thoughts sown by the devil grow in the minds of sinners until “the feynd plettis his nettis scharp and rude” (1911), an action which also appears in the manuscript's allegorization quoted above (“linum … ex quibus dyabolus texit rethe”).

Henryson then gives ornamented descriptions of the birds' allegorical roles as mentioned in the commentaries:

Thir hungrie birdis, wretchis we may call,
Ay scraipand in this warldis vane plesance,
Greddie to gadder gudis temporall,
Quhilk as the calf ar tume without substance.

(1916-19)

As in the scholastic comments, the swallow as preacher is mentioned only in passing; Henryson devotes most of his attention to the pains which sinners will suffer at the hands of the devil:

This swallow, quhilk eschaipit is the snair,
The halie preichour weill may signifie,
Exhortand folk to walk, and ay be wair
Fra nettis of our wickit enemie
Quha sleipis not, bot euer is reddie,
Quhen wretchis in this warldis calf dois scraip,
To draw his net, that thay may not eschaip.

(1923-29)

The narrator gives us three more stanzas of exhortation to avoid sin, the last of which begins in the first-person plural but shifts to third-person singular at the end:

Pray we theirfoir quhill we ar in this lyfe
For four thingis: the first, fra sin remufe;
The secund is to seis all weir and stryfe;
The thrid is perfite cheritie and lufe;
The feird thing is, and maist for our behufe,
That is in blis with angellis to be fallow.
And thus endis the preiching of the swallow.

(1944-50)

The abrupt change of person and focus from the allegorical mode to a homiletic tone shares formal similarities with the Auctores octo commentary, in which we are given no transition between the second-person command and the third-person allegorization.

The stanza shows the narrator following the instructions of Aesop in the final stanza of the previous fable: he is persuading people to pray. In doing so, he is transformed. His voice merges with that of the swallow, a transformation emphasized by the last line, in which the bird's preaching is said to end simultaneously with the narrator's. The reader has been partially prepared for the reappearance of an animal voice in the moralitas by the strange renaissance of the sheep in the final verses of the fable of the sheep and the dog, where the animal supplies the moral. In addition, the conjunction of human and animal voices recalls the human-into-beast translation described in Henryson's prologue. It is therefore appropriate that he use first-person plural in addressing his audience, for he, like us, has debased his human nature through beastly sinfulness. Also implied in this audience are the “maisteris” to whom the narrator appeals in the prologue. We must all pray together for guidance.

The penultimate fable in the Morall Fabillis, “The Wolf and the Lamb,” evidently owes little to the scholastic commentary tradition. Rather, it seems to have been placed here in order to summarize the moral interests of the three previous fables from the beast-epic tradition. The figurative roles of the lamb as “pure pepill” (2707) and the wolf as “false extortioneris / And oppressouris of pure men” (2711-12) reflect Walter's moralitas as much as any scholastic commentary. Indeed, the lengthy, formally structured description of the kinds of wolves which rule in the world (2714 ff.) clearly grew from the final clause of Walter's moral, “Hii regnant qualibet urbe lupi” (317).

Henryson's version of Walter's third tale, “De mure et rana,” rewritten as the final Middle Scots fable, “The Paddock and the Mouse,” evidently has nearly as unified an allegorical tradition as the fable of the swallow and the linen. In both of the incunables the commentators include both social and allegorical readings. The Esopus moralizatus, after an elaborately embellished plot summary, gives this allegorical reading:

Allegorice per ranam potest intelligi caro humana; per murem autem intelligitur anima que adversus carnem semper militat. Caro concupiscit adversus spiritum et spiritus adversus carnem. Caro enim nititur trahere animam ad terrena, et carnales delectationes. Anima vero resilit ad bona opera. Et istis sic ligantibus venit milvus, id est diabolus, quasi bolus in morsus duorum, scilicet corporis et anima. Virtus aliter sicut tangitur in fine littere: per ranam intelligant [sic] deceptores bonum dicentes deceptationemque intendentes; conantur enim alios decipere. Et sic quandoque cadunt in insidias quos aliis paraverunt. Sic dicitur in psalmo, “Incidit in foveam,” etc.²⁵

Here the commentator has interpreted not only the fable but also his own interpretation, by writing a situational etymology for the “diabolus,” which the kite is said to represent. This is an interesting example of the displacement of the authoritative source, cited by Copeland: the commentator finds his own text rather than the authoritative fable worthy of interpretation on the verbal level.

The Auctores octo commentator remains more faithful to the fable plot in his summary, and he gives much the same allegory as above:

Allegoria: per ranam intellige corpus cuiuslibet hominis, per murem animam qui nititur ad bona opera vel ad regnum dei; sed corpus retrahit eam, et sic milvus, id est diabolus, venit utrunque rumpens, scilicet corpus et animam. Fructus talis est quod non promittamus prodesse cum possimus nosmetipsos iuvare et volumus obesse.

As for other fables, BL MS. Add. 11897 gives a reading similar to that in the Auctores octo text, but the commentator allegorizes more of the elements of the plot, thus more closely approaching Henryson's moralitas:

Allegoria: per mure intelligere possumus anima que ad bonum et ad celestia regna nititur et tendit, per rana corpus hominis quod vivit in deliciis presentis seculi, per lacum vero presens seculum aut mundum, deliciis et occupacionibus variis fluctuans. Unde sic rana promiserat mure velle transducere ipsum per lacum, licet pretendebat dolum quia nitebatur, per hoc murem submergere. Sic corpus humanum educatum in deliciis promittit animae servitutem in istis temporalibus, in quibus non est salus nec servitas. Anima non nititur in hereditatem celestibus. Iuxta illud ratio semper deprecatur ad optima. Et ita ipsis contra se reluctantibus, secundum quod dicit apostolus, “Caro concupiscit adversus spiritum et spiritus adversus carnem.” Tandem supervenit milvus rapax, id est diabolus, qui rapit utrunque et pena cruciat eternaliter. Fructus apologi est: Ne dum promittimus prodesse intendemus ut conemur obesse, ut dum nitimur decipere alios redundat pena in nosmetipsos.

(3r)

Again, we see the double moralitas, which includes both social figuration and spiritual allegory.²⁶

Henryson reproduces the structure of this two-fold interpretation, placing the social reading first. This moralitas is structurally similar to that for the fable of the two mice: each of its first three stanzas, written in the eight-line ballade form, concludes with an identical message, in this case a warning about the evils of finding oneself with a wicked companion (Middle Scots “marrow”). The second of these stanzas reads as follows:

Ane fals intent vnder ane fair pretence
Hes causit mony innocent for to de;
Grit folie is to gif ouer sone credence
To all that speiks fairlie vnto the;
Ane silkin toung, ane hart of crueltie,
Smytis more sore than ony schot of arrow;
Brother, gif thow be wyse, I reid the fle
To matche the with ane thrawart fenȝeit marrow.

(2918-25)

It is possible that the image of the painful arrow of deceit has as its source an auctoritas from the commentary tradition; in BL MS Add. 11897, the same image, drawn from Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria Nova, appears in marginalia adjacent to the moralitas of Walter's fable. The line reads “Gaufredus in Poetria: Sepe sagittantem didicit referire sagitta,” a reference to line 201 of Geoffrey's work.²⁷ If Henryson had this marginal gloss in mind, his warning against false friends tacitly includes its own warning to the liars themselves.

After the three ballade stanzas the poet returns to the rhyme royal form and simultaneously signals the change from social figuration to spiritual allegory. The narrator's opening words here, referring to the diatribe against false friends, tell us a good deal about how fables were read in Henryson's day:

This hald in mynd; rycht more I sall the tell
Quhair by thir beistis may be figurate.

(2934-35)

Readers are meant to keep in mind both the social interpretation which the narrator has just concluded, and the religious allegory which immediately follows. Henryson expects us to balance these two forms of interpretation as we read, retaining both lessons as we should when studying the Auctores octo and MS Add. 11897 comments above. Henryson also could have borrowed from these commentators the idea that the narrator should make a self-conscious declaration that the type of figuration is about to change; as “Fructus talis est” prepares us for a different kind of allegorical exploration, so does Henryson's couplet.

Henryson translates the first of the comments' allegorized animal roles as follows:

The paddok, vsand in the flude to duell,
Is mannis bodie, swymand air and late
In to this warld, with cairis implicate:
Now hie, now law, quhylis plungit vp, quhylis doun,
Ay in perrell, and reddie for to droun.

(2936-40)

“Mannis body” is more directly indebted to the Auctores octo and MS Add. 11897 commentaries, which use the phrase “corpus (cuiuslibet) hominis,” than to “caro humana” in the Esopus moralizatus.

On the other hand, while the basic mouse/anima allegorization could have been taken from any of these sources, the concluding portion of this description seems to reflect the Esopus:

This lytill mous, heir knit thus be the schyn,
The saull of man betakin may in deid—
Bundin, and fra the bodie may not twyn,
Quhill cruell deth cum brek of lyfe the threid—
The quhilk to droun suld ever stand in dreid
Of carnall lust be the suggestioun,
Quhilk drawis ay the saull and druggis doun.

(2948-54)

The final verses of this stanza are quite close to the sentence in the Esopus moralizatus which warns that the flesh strives to drag (“trahere”) the soul toward earthly things and carnal delights (“carnales delectationes”).

While Henryson's allegorization of the water as the world is a logical extension of the roles for the mouse and the frog, it also bears a striking resemblance to the description in BL MS Add. 11897:

The watter is the warld, ay welterand
With mony wall of tribulatioun,
In quhilk the saull and bodye wer steirrand,
Standand distinyt in thair opinioun:
The spreit vpwart, the body precis doun;
The saull rycht fane wald be brocht ouer, I wis,
Out of this warld into the heuinnis blis.

(2954-60)

In both the poem and the manuscript comment the water is described with a present participle denoting motion (“fluctuans” and “welterand”) associated with the troubles which the soul will find therein (“deliciis et occupacionibus variis” and “tribulations”), and both morals mention that the mouse/soul wants to cross the water in order to reach the heavenly kingdom (“hereditatem celestibus” and “heuinnis blis”), an idea which in both texts exists independently of any directly stated allegorical correlation between the opposite bank and heaven.

Henryson's allegorization of the kite as death seems to be his own:

The gled is deith, that cummis suddandlie
As dois ane theif, and cuttis sone the battall:
Be vigilant thairfoir and ay reddie,
For mannis lyfe is brukill and ay mortall.

(2962-65)

Because of the change of roles for the kite, Henryson's fable is more hopeful than is his source; the body and soul are taken by death rather than chewed to pieces by the devil, and the poet leaves the destiny of the soul to the imagination of the reader.²⁸

Henryson works with the scholastic fable tradition in much the same way that modern scholars work with critical material: sometimes adopting it wholeheartedly with very few changes, at other times rejecting it entirely, but most often simply showing that the tradition has been understood and absorbed. Furthermore, the poet/schoolmaster must have felt comfortable enough with the structure and function of fable allegory (which he had probably taught many times) to detach it completely from fable and transfer it to beast-epic, as the same variety of approach characterizes the moralitates of the six fables excluded from this discussion.

As a collection, the Morall Fabillis contains textbook examples of what Rita Copeland has helpfully categorized as “primary translations” and “secondary translations”:

Primary translations … operate according to the terms of exegesis: they give prominence to an exegetical motive by claiming to serve and supplement a textual authority, but they actually work to challenge and appropriate that textual authority. Secondary translations, on the other hand, give precedence to rhetorical motives, defining themselves as independent productive acts: characteristically they supress any sign of exegetical service to a specific source, even though they produce themselves through such exegetical techniques.²⁹

The primary translations in the collection are the four fables most clearly allied with scholastic exegesis: Henryson has cited the authoritative source for the fables but not the commentary, which he then covertly uses to appropriate much of the authority of the fables themselves. Of course Henryson cannot hide his source for “The Two Mice,” “The Sheep and the Dog,” and “The Wolf and the Lamb,” but he treats them differently from the other Aesopic fables. This trio shows relations to scholastic commentary while allowing the poet to make full use of the topics and commonplaces of fifteenth-century Scottish political and legal dialectic. Henryson employs some of the tools of exegesis in the fables' moralitates, but they are serving his vision of society rather than the source text.

III

In sum, it appears that Henryson's choices for the roles assigned to the characters of the Aesopic fables were largely but not entirely determined by what he had learned from the scholastic commentaries on Walter's fables. While his debt to this source extends to basic content in at least two fables, he owes even more to fable commentary for the form which some of his moralitates take, a form which he applies successfully to beast epic. That form is most clearly scholastic when it is most deeply allegorical, but like the scholastic commentators, Henryson employed a broad range of figurative and allegorical interpretations, some apparently his own, to make his collection richly multidimensional.

By explaining the elements of the Morall Fabillis which educated fifteenth- and sixteenth-century readers would have viewed as traditional but which we as modern readers find unsettling, we can begin to dispense with modern scholars' prejudices that Henryson was to some degree delighting in being perverse. Simultaneously we can begin to appreciate him both for preserving the variety inherent in the scholastic fable tradition and for embellishing it with a few new flourishes.

Notes

1. This identification was made by nineteenth-century editor Léopold Hervieux in Les Fabulistes Latins depuis le siècle d'Auguste jusqu'à la fin du moyen âge, vol. 1 (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1893-99), 475-95, who cites a group of medieval manuscripts and incunables attributing the fables to Gualterus Anglicus. Hervieux goes on to identify this Gualterus as chaplain of Henry II of England. I am using this name not because I believe that Hervieux's identification is reliable enough to invite biographical speculation about the fables' author, but simply for the sake of convenience. The collection's other common name, the Anonymus Neveleti, is not based upon any medieval aspect of it, but rather, upon its appearance in the anthology Mythologia Aesopica, published in Frankfurt in 1610 by Isaac Nevelet.

2. For lists of manuscripts, see Hervieux, I. 503-602; Klaus Grubmüller, Meister Esopus (Munich: Artemis, 1977), 82, n. 180; and Paul Oskar Kristeller, Iter Italicum, vols. 1-6 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1963-1991). Kristeller places this fable collection under the index heading “Aesop,” where it can be identified by its incipit, “Ut iuvet.”

3. Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 103.

4. Prisciani Caesariensis, Opuscula, vol. 1, ed. Marina Passalacqua (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1987), 33-34.

5. In this article I will refer to the Esopus moralizatus cum bono commento printed in Cologne by Heinrich Quentell in 1492, and to the Auctores octo published by Jehan de Vingle in Lyon in 1495. Since neither book is paginated, I will cite passages according to the number of the fable in which they appear.

6. Hervieux, I. 602-35. Deriding the fable commentaries as “puerile,” Hervieux does not consistently indicate which commentaries appear in the editions that he lists.

7. See, for example, James Kinsley, Scottish Poetry (London: Cassell, 1955); David Murtaugh, “Henryson's Animals,” TSLL 14 (1972): 408-9; and H. Harvey Wood, Two Scots Chaucerians (London: Longman, 1967), 17.

8. ELH 29 (1962): 337-56.

9. All quotations of Henryson's work, cited by line number, are taken from The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. Denton Fox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).

10. See, for example, Augustine's Contra Mendacium (469-528 in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, vol. 41; Leipzig: Freytag, 1900), 508-9; Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. William Harris Stahl (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1952), I.ii.9.

11. For a description of the categories used in this type of prologue, see A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 28-29.

12. Hervieux, II.316.

13. See Fox's discussion of the term's scholastic usage in his edition of Henryson's poems (xv).

14. The Latin Element in the Vocabulary of the Earlier Makars Henryson and Dunbar, Lund Studies in English 51 (Lund: Gleerup, 1977), 57.

15. Iaspidis esse decem species septemque feruntur
    Hic et multorum cognoscitur esse colorem
    Et multi nasci perhibetur partibus orbis.
    Optimus et viridi translucentique colore,
    Et qui plus soleat virtutus habere probatur.
    Caste portatus fugat et febres et hydropem
    Appositque iuvat mulierem parturientem,
    Et tutamen portanti creditur esse.
    Nam consecratus gratum facit, atque potentem.
    Et sicut perhibent, phantasmata noxia pellit
    Cuius in argento vis fortior esse putatur.

    (n.p.)

    (De Gemmis Scriptum Evacis Regis Arabum [Lubeck: H. Rantzovius, 1575]).

16. The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. Henry Noble McCracken, EETS o.s. 192 (London: 1934), 571-72.

17. “Nota quod jaspis dicitur quasi ‘iacens inter aspides vel in fronte aspidis,’ vel dicitur ab ‘yos’ grece, quod est viride latine, quia est viridi coloris.”

18. In his article, “Chaucer's Influence on Henryson's Fables: The Use of Proverbs and Sententiae” (MÆ 39: 20-27), Donald McDonald cites Chaucer as the source for Henryson's repeated use of proverbial auctoritates such as this reference to Solomon, but it seems equally possible that Henryson, at least in this work, picked up the technique from scholastic commentary.

19. In the Esopus moralizatus, these roles appear in Fables II, V, VIII, XIII, and XIV.

20. For other examples of direct address used by characters in moralitates, see Fables XVIII, XXII, XXXII, XXXIV, XXXVIII, XLI, and LXI in the Auctores octo. In these examples, it is not the fable character but rather the figurative or allegorical representative who speaks, generally paraphrasing something which the fable character has said. While these examples do not represent exactly the technique employed by Henryson, they show the manner in which commentators made the division between fable character and its figurative or allegorical cognate less distinct.

21. In Ulrich Broich, ed. Functions of Literature: Essays Presented to Erwin Wolff on his Sixtieth Birthday (Munich: Niemeyer, 1984), 81-99.

22. Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 195-99.

23. Some of these manuscripts are as follows: Augsburg, Universitätsbibliothek MS II.1.4°.27; Basel, Universitätsbibliothek MS F.IV.50; Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz MSS Lat. Qu. 18 and Lat. Qu. 382; Freiburg, Universitätsbibliothek MS 21; Halle, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt MS Stolb.-Wern. Za 64; Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek MS 1084; Mainz, Stadtbibliothek 540; Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana MS Trotti 161; Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 609, 7680, 14529, 14703, 16213, 19667, 22404; Stuttgart, Würtembergische Landesbibliothek MSS HB XII.4 and HB I.127; Treviso, Biblioteca Comunale MS 156; Trier, Stadtbibliothek MSS 132, 756, and 1109; Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek MS 185 Helmst.; Wroçław, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka MSS II.Q.33, IV.Q.4, IV.Q.81, IV.Q.88.

    Having seen only about 100 of the 160 extant manuscripts of the Latin fables, I assume that this allegory for the fable appears in other manuscripts as well.

24. See B. G. Koonce, “Satan the Fowler,” MS 21 (1959): 176-84.

25. This phrase appears in Psalm 7:16, part of a passage referring to God's punishment of a wicked man:

    15. Behold, he hath been in labour with injustice; he hath conceived sorrow, and brought forth iniquity.

    16. He hath opened a pit and dug it: and he is fallen into the hole [incidit in foveam] he made.

    17. His sorrow shall be turned on his own head: and his iniquity shall come down upon his crown.

    (Douay-Rheims)

26. In his brief exploration of the similarities between scholastic commentaries and Henryson's fables, Douglas Gray also makes this point (127).

    The same allegory, though not always the same two-fold interpretation, is reproduced in all but three of the manuscripts listed in note 23; those lacking the allegory are Augsburg Universitätsbibliothek MS II.1.4°.27, Munich Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 22404, and Stuttgart Würtembergische Landesbibliothek MS HB XII.4.

27. Of course the similarity of this imagery may be entirely coincidental, since each of these stanzas features a rhyme-word at the conclusion of the sixth line which anticipates “marrow”; Henryson also uses “barrow” and “tarrow.” Even though he could certainly have arrived at the use of this word without external influence, the numerous similarities of the Morall Fabillis to BL MS Add. 11897 make this coincidence worth a passing mention.

28. Ian W. A. Jamieson, in his dissertation, “The Poetry of Robert Henryson: A Study of the Use of Source Material” (University of Edinburgh, 1964), notes the similarity between Henryson's moralitas and that given for the same fable in the MS 141, No. 328 of the Municipal Library of Bern (qtd. in Henryson 325, n.1). The fabulist responsible for this collection, which Hervieux called the “Bern Romulus,” wrote after his very brief version of the fable, “Sic maiores et minores inter se disceptantes. Sic etiam dyabolus animam et corpus dissipat” (Hervieux, II.738). Jamieson could not explain the relationship between this fifteenth-century manuscript, of which only one copy is extant, and Henryson's Morall Fabillis, but a similar branch of fable commentary doubtless explains the resemblance.

29. Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages, 177.