Books of the duchess : Eleanor cobham, Henryson's cresseid, and the politics of complaint

Abstract

The scandal surrounding the downfall of Eleanor Cobham, second wife of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester—especially as represented in the anonymous Lament of the Duchess of Gloucester—forms an important historical precedent for several features of Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid otherwise unaccounted for in previous scholarship. In charting the relationship between these two late medieval poems, the author examines the network of literary and political interactions between Scotland and England in the fifteenth century and identifies the larger cultural field in which both poems participate as “historical” complaint narratives. Finally, the author uncover traces left by the intersection of the Lament and the Testament in Renaissance poetry, especially the flowering of poems in the Mirror for Magistrates tradition. Recognizing this new source of Henryson’s poem allows us to situate the Testament in a political milieu, and illuminates the complicated generic contexts of the Testament and the methods behind Henrys...