SOURCE: Boffey, Julia. “Lydgate, Henryson, and the Literary Testament.” Modern Language Quarterly 53, no. 1 (March 1992): 41-56.

In the essay which follows, Boffey delineates some of the fifteenth-century conventions which are essential for a full appreciation of John Lydgate's Testament and Henryson's Testament of Cresseid.

Literary experiment with the matter and form of the legal testament held a particular appeal for the Middle Ages, in part perhaps because it offered the opportunity of creating a text around an authenticating impulse similar to that built into the literary complaint or epistle: a testator, like a plaintiff or a correspondent, has some ostensible justification for generating a written document. Scholarly studies of the genre have variously attempted to trace its classical antecedents, to sort the surviving texts into related categories, and to examine their resemblances to nonliterary, legal instruments.¹ They have drawn collectively on examples in Latin and in most of the...