Abstract
Few poems are more insistent about the fixed connection between sex and the stars than Robert Henryson’s “Testament of Cresseid.” Over a third of the narrative is diverted to the poem’s elaborate portraits of the seven planets, and the disease this cosmological court metes out to the unfortunate Cresseid derives both from luminary alignment and wanton sexuality.1 As leprosy was believed to emerge from the melancholic humor, it is no accident that the bilious Saturn and the reflective Luna align to administer a malady that was equally thought to derive from sexual promiscuity.2 Positioning his heroine on the cusp between agency and destiny, Henryson bothered to get the science right in arranging cosmological forces that might easily be said to vitiate control over the tragic fate Cresseid claims as her own by the poem’s end.3 Why would Henryson go to this effort, we might ask, especially since more recent critics of the poem have done little more than acknowledge the precision with which Henryson rendered medieval astrological lore?4 If Saturn was legendarily hostile toward humanity, and Luna simply mirrored the position of the planet with which she was coupled, does this pairing seal anything beyond Cresseid’s doom? Apparently not, if we follow the prevailing critical viewpoint, which largely ignores Henryson’s apparent fascination with the seemingly esoteric field of cosmological knowledge.5 Bracketing this part of the poem, marking it off as a “pagan” set piece in an otherwise Christianized myth of Troy, focuses attention on the redemption narrative that supposedly galvanizes this poem’s plot.
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Notes
Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, trans. Matthew Adamson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 177–94.
Saul Brody, The Disease of the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974).
Marshall W. Stearns, “Robert Henryson and the Leper Cresseid,” Modern Language Notes 59.4 (1944): 265–69.
Johnstone Parr, “Cresseid’s Leprosy Again,” Modern Language Notes 60.7 (1945): 487–91.
Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York: Macmillan, 1923).
Walter Clyde Curry, Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926).
Barbara Newman helpfully presents this information as it relates to medieval theories of gender in her invaluable book, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
Edward Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200–1687 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Pierre Duhem, Medieval Cosmology: Theories of Infinity, Place, Time, Void, and the Plurality of Worlds, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
Ralph Hanna’s “Cresseid’s Dream and Henryson’s Testament,” in Chaucer and Middle English Studies in Honour of Rossell Hope Robbins, ed. B. Rowland and L. A. Duchemin (London: Allen & Unwin, 1974), pp. 288–97.
Jamie Fumo, “‘Books of the Duchess: Eleanor Cobham, Henryson’s Cresseid, and the Politics of Complaint,” Viator 37 (2006): pp. 447–77 [p. 465].
H. E. Rollins, “The Troilus-Cressida Story from Chaucer to Shakespeare,” PMLA 32.3 (1917): 383–429.
Denton Fox, Testament of Cresseid (London, 1968).
Gretchen Mieszkowski, “The Reputation of Criseyde, 1155–1500,” Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of the Arts and Sciences 43 (1971): 71–153.
Lee Patterson, “Christian and Pagan in The Testament of Cresseid,” Philological Quarterly 52 (1973): 696–714.
Edwin D. Craun, “Blaspheming her ‘Awin God’: Cresseid’s Lamentation in Henryson’s Testament,” Studies in Philology 82.1 (1985): 24–41.
See A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 178.
Jana Mathews, “Land, Lepers, and the Law in The Testament of Cresseid” in The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 40–66.
Florence H. Ridley, “A Plea for the Middle Scots,” in The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature, ed. L. D. Benson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 175–96.
James R. Goldstein, The Matter of Scotland: Historical Narrative in Medieval Scotland (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), pp. 57–103.
Susan Aronstein, “Cresseid Reading Cresseid: Redemption and Translation in Henryson’s Testament,” Scottish Literary Journal 21.2 (1994): 5–22.
George Edmondson, “Henryson’s Doubt: Neighbors and Negation in The Testament of Cresseid,” Exemplaria 20.2 (2008): 165–96.
Felicity Riddy, “‘Abject Odious’: Feminine and Masculine in Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid,” Chaucer to Spenser: A Critical Reader, ed. Derek Pearsall (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 280–96.
All quotations taken from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. Benson, R. Pratt, and F. N. Robinson (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1986), hereafter cited parenthetically.
Kathleen Forni, The Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Counterfeit Canon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), p. 111, characterizes the “tabloid adventures” of Cresseid.
All quotations taken from The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. R. L. Kindrick (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), hereafter cited parenthetically.
Walter Scheps, “A Climatological Reading of Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid,” Studies in Scottish Literature 15 (1980): 80–87.
Alasdair A. MacDonald, “Fervent Weather: A Difficulty in Robert Henryson’s Testatment of Cresseid,” Scottish Studies 4 (1984): 271–80.
David J. Parkinson, “Henryson’s Scottish Tragedy,” Chaucer Review 25.4 (1991): 355–62.
See Craun, “Blaspheming,” 28–34; and Jennifer Strauss, “To Speak Once More of Cresseid: Henryson’s Testament Reconsidered,” Scottish Literary Journal 4.2 (1977): 5–13.
See Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 183–88.
E. Ann Matter “Passions and Ecstasies of Late Medieval Religious Women,” in The Representation of Women’s Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, ed. Lisa Perfetti (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), p. 25 [22–42].
Keith D. Lilley’s fascinating study, City and Cosmos: The Medieval World in Urban Form (London: Reaktion Books, 2009).
Marshall W. Stearns, “The Planet Portraits of Robert Henryson,” PMLA 59.4 (1944): 911–927.
E. M. W. Tillyard, “Henryson: The Testament of Cresseid,” Five Poems: 1470–1870: An Elementary Essay on the Background of English Literature (London, 1848), pp. 5–29.
Gayle Margherita, “Criseyde’s Remains: Romance and the Question of Justice,” Exemplaria 12.2 (2000): 257–92.
Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 101–27.
Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louis Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 28.
Derrida, The Animal, p. 27. The idea of a “nonrecognition scene” comes from Derek Pearsall, “Quha wait gif all that Chauceir wrait was trew?’: Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid,” New Perspectives on Middle English Texts: A Festschrift for R.A. Waldron, ed. Susan Powell and Jeremy J. Smith (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2000), p 177 [169–82].
Douglas Gray, Robert Henryson (Leiden: Brill, 1979), p. 201.
See my book, Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood (New York: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 17–32.
Julia Boffey, “Lydgate, Henryson, and the Literary Testament,” Modern Language Quarterly 53.1 (1992): 52–53 (41–56).
Stanley Rubin, Medieval English Medicine (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1974), pp. 154–55.
James Simpson notes, The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 2, 1350–1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 190.
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© 2013 Jennifer N. Brown and Marla Segol
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Crocker, H. (2013). Cresseid’s Dignity: Cosmology and Sexuality in Henryson’s “Testament”. In: Brown, J.N., Segol, M. (eds) Sexuality, Sociality, and Cosmology in Medieval Literary Texts. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137037411_9
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