The Testament of Cresseid

Painting by Robert Campin, 1438. Henryson addressed his Testament of Cresseid to a 15th century readership of women.

Diomede and Cressida, perhaps

The Testament of Cresseid is a narrative poem written by the Scottish makar Robert Henryson. It imagines a tragic fate for Cressida in the medieval story of Troilus and Criseyde which was left untold in Geoffrey Chaucer's version. The poem also features graphically-realised portraits of the planetary pantheon of gods in the dream vision at its heart. Henryson's cogent psychological drama makes the poem one of the great works of northern renaissance literature.

The poem was written in Middle Scots; a modern English translation by Seamus Heaney was published in 2004.

Characters

• Cresseid, daughter of Calchas, who is punished for breaking her vow of love to Troilus
• Troilus, one of the sons of Trojan king Priam, and former lover of Cresseid

Editions

The Poems of Robert Henryson. Ed. Robert L. Kindrick. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997. Electronic Access.

Further reading

• Gray, Douglas. Robert Henryson. English Writers of the Late Middle Ages, no. 9. Brookfield, Vermont: Variorum, 1996.
• Kindrick, Robert L. "Monarchs and Monarchy in the Poetry of Henryson and Dunbar." In Actes du 2e Colloque de Langue et de Littérature Ecossaisses. Eds. Jean-Jacques Blanchot and Claude Graf. Strasbourg: Université de Strasbourg, 1979. Pp. 307-25.
• McDiarmid, Matthew P. "Robert Henryson in his Poems." In Bards and Makars. Eds. Adam J. Aitken, Matthew P. McDiarmid, and Derick S. Thompson. Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1977. Pp. 27-40.
• Stephenson, William. "The Acrostic “Fictio” in Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid (Lines 58–63)," Chaucer Review, 92.2 (1994), 163–75.
• Utz, Richard. "Writing Alternative Worlds: Rituals of Authorship and Authority in Late Medieval Theological and Literary Discourse." In Creations: Medieval Rituals, the Arts, and the Concept of Creation. Eds. Nils Holger Petersen, et al. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Pp. 121-38.
• Whiting, B. J. "A Probable Allusion to Henryson's 'Testament of Cresseid.' " Modern Language Review 40 (1945), 46-47.