SOURCE: Wheatley, Edward. “Scholastic Commentary and Robert Henryson's Morall Fabillis: The Aesopic Fables.” Studies in Philology 91, no. 1 (1994): 70-99.

In the following essay, Wheatley examines scholastic commentaries on fable collections available to Henryson that may have been influential in his composition of the Morall Fabillis.

I

Modern critics have examined Robert Henryson's Morall Fabillis in relation to the sermons, popular literature, and political events of Henryson's day, but the fables have never been systematically compared to common educational texts, even though Henryson, a school-master, acknowledges the source for some of his fables as the classroom Aesop of his era. The Middle Scots poet took seven tales from one of the so-called “Romulus” collections, a group of sixty Latin verse fables probably written in the late twelfth century and generally attributed to Gualterus Anglicus (Walter of England).¹ This collection became popular enough to displace Avianus's fables as the curricular representative...