SOURCE: Johnson, Ian. “Hellish Complexity in Henryson's Orpheus.” Forum for Modern Language Studies XXXVIII, no. 4 (October 2002): 412-19.

In the following essay, Johnson examines Henryson's skillful synthesis of source materials with his own creative art in his Orpheus and Eurydice.

It seems fruitful for modern scholars interested in medieval translation and its role in cultural history to use oppositional or binaristic concepts and terms like “contest”, “appropriation”, “supplanting”, “displacement”, “dominance”, “dependence” and “supplement(arity)”.¹ This is often accompanied by an understandable reliance on the general idea that, as the Middle Ages “progress”, the vernacular, an autonomous (if rather subjected) phenomenon, determinedly expropriates the auctoritas of Latin according to its own distinctively “vernacular” agenda. This agenda is palpably definable against that of learned, often clerical, Latin culture. The inherent binarism of this approach insists on the “conflicted” nature of discourses and linguistic cultures. This can lead to an overlooking of...