Robert Henryson
Robert Henryson was a fifteenth-century Scottish poet and schoolmaster. His surviving works include The Testament of Cresseid and The Morall Fabillis.
The Testament of Cresseid: A Middle Scots poem in which Cresseid, rejected by Troilus, suffers disease and reflects on Fortune and divine justice. Henryson's sequel to Chaucer's Troilus gives Cresseid a tragic fate and an interior life.
Middle Scots: The form of Scots used in literature and administration from roughly the late fourteenth to the early eighteenth century. Henryson's language places his poems within Scotland's flourishing late-medieval written culture.
Dunfermline Abbey: A Benedictine abbey in Fife, Scotland, that became a major religious and royal center. A late-fifteenth-century record associates Henryson with teaching at the abbey's grammar school.
Geoffrey Chaucer: An English poet of the fourteenth century, best known for The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde. Henryson inherits Chaucer's characters but gives Cresseid a conclusion absent from the earlier poem.
The Morall Fabillis: A collection of thirteen Middle Scots beast fables, mostly adapted from Aesop, with moral interpretations. Its fables are Henryson's most sustained experiment in combining comic storytelling with moral commentary.
Chaucerian influence: The literary influence of Geoffrey Chaucer on later English and Scottish poets, especially in narrative form and characterization. Henryson adapts Chaucer's Troilus and the Canterbury Tales while redirecting their meanings.
University of Glasgow: A public research university founded in Glasgow in 1451. A Robert Henryson appears in its records as a bachelor of arts, though identification with the poet is not certain.
Courtly love: A literary convention portraying idealized, often constrained desire between a lover and a socially elevated beloved. Henryson's Robene and Makyne turns the expected pursuit of the beloved into a sharp reversal.
Orpheus and Eurydice: A Middle Scots poem retelling the classical story of Orpheus's descent to the underworld to recover Eurydice. Henryson recasts the myth as an allegory of reason, desire, and the soul.
Scottish makar: A poet in the Scottish courtly tradition, especially one writing in Scots during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Henryson is counted among the makars whose work helped establish a national literary tradition.