Abstract
Widely considered by critics as the most important of the Middle Scots poets (a group usually encompassing, in addition to Henryson, William Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and James I of Scotland), almost everything about Henryson’s life is conjecture. His work primarily circulated during the last quarter of the fifteenth century, and most scholars have agreed that he was the master of the grammar school at the Benedictine Abbey in Dunfermline, Fife. Henryson is clearly influenced by Chaucer, and it is for this that he is often relegated to the status of “Scottish Chaucerian,” a title that does not take into account his own rich poetic abilities and additions to the medieval canon.1 How Henryson exceeds and pays homage to this influence is evident in his “Orpheus and Eurydice,” which reflects Chaucer’s interest in the philosophy of Boethius; but it is not from Chaucer that Henryson finds his muse here, but rather Boethius himself, from whom Henryson takes the legend of Orpheus and to whom he directs his moralizing epilogue of the poem. Henryson also states that he is drawing on the Anglo-Norman chronicler Nicholas Trivet’s analysis of the story, which explicitly links the Boethian cosmology he writes into the story to that of a sexual and moral lesson. Despite these named sources, though, there is really no known analogue for Henryson’s version of the story; other than the skeletal structure of the tale, it appears to be mainly of his own invention.
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Notes
Walter Scheps, “Chaucer and the Middle Scots Poets,” Studies in Scottish Literature. 22 (1987): 44–59.
Kenneth R. R. Gros Louis, “Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice and the Orpheus Traditions of the Middle Ages,” Speculum 41(1996): 643–55 (646).
John Block Friedman, Orpheus in the Middle Ages, (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000).
Bruce Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001) pp. 295–343.
Alessandra Petrina, “Robert Henryson’s ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’ and Its Sources,” in Fifteenth-Century Studies: Volume 33, ed. Edelgard E. DuBruck and Barbara I. Gusick (Rochester: Camden House, 2008), p. 200 [pp. 198–217].
Anne M. McKim, “Henryson’s Orpheus and Testament of Cresseid,” in A Companion to Medieval Scottish Poetry, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt and Janet Hadley Williams, (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), p. 106 [pp. 105–118].
See Phillipa Hardman, “Narrative Typology: Chaucer’s Use of the Story of Orpheus,” Modern Language Review 85 (1990): 545–54.
The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. Robert L. Kindrick, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications 1997), p. 192
Joanna Martin, Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p. 88.
Kevin J. McGinley, “‘The Fen3eit’ and the Feminine: Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice and the Gendering of Poetry,” in Woman and the Feminine in Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing, ed. Sarah M. Dunnigan, C. Marie Harker and Evelyn S. Newman, (Palgrave: New York, 2004), p. 79 [pp. 74–88].
Bruce Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 7.
John MacQueen, Complete and Full with Numbers: The Narrative Poetry of Robert Henryson, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), p. 251.
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© 2013 Jennifer N. Brown and Marla Segol
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Brown, J.N. (2013). Cosmology, Sexuality, and Music in Robert Henryson’s “Orpheus and Eurydice”. 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_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137037411_8
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