I am grateful to Elizabeth Fowler, Allen Frantzen, Michael Lower, and Derek Pearsall for
extremely helpful comments they made on an earlier version of this essay.
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1. The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. Denton Fox (Oxford, 1981), pp. xiii and
xxi. Denton Fox carefully reviews all evidence of Henryson's life in Poems, pp. xiii-xxv.
2. See Denton Fox, "The Scottish Chaucerians," in Chaucer and
Chaucerians, ed. D.S. Brewer (London, 1966), pp. 164-200. Fox makes these points in trying
to explain such a baggy classification.
3. The first extant version of Aesopic fables in English are from the first half of the
fifteenth century by John Lydgate.
4. For the use of the fables in medieval England see Stephen Manning, "The Nun's
Priest's Morality and the Medieval Attitude Toward Fables," Journal of English and
Germanic Philology 59 (1960), 403-16; Evelyn Newlyn, "Robert Henryson and the
Popular Fable Tradition in the Middle Ages," Journal of Popular Culture 14 (1984),
108-18; and Edward Wheatley, Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer, and His
Followers (Gainesville, 2000), pp. 52-96. For the use of fables as exempla in sermons see J.
A. Mosher, The Exemplum in the Early Religious and Didactic Literature of England
(New York, 1911), and J. T. Welter, L'Exemplum dans la littérature religieuse
didactique du moyen âge (Paris, 1927); for the popularity of animal-tale literature in the
fifteenth century see I. W. A. Jamieson, "The Beast Tale in Middle Scots,"
Paragon 2 (1976), 26-36.
5. Arno Schirokauer, cited by Fox in Poems, p. xlii.
6. See for example George Gopen, "The Essential Seriousness of Robert
Henryson's Moral Fables: A Study in Structure," Studies in Philology 82 (1985),
42-59; Robert Kindrick, Henryson and the Medieval Arts of Rhetoric (New York, 1993);
Wheatley, Mastering Aesop; and Rosemary Greentree, Reader, Teller, and Teacher:
The Narrator of Robert Henryson's Moral Fables (Frankfurt, 1993).
7. "Prologue," The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. Denton Fox
(Oxford, 1981), p. 3, ll. 12-14. The lines are numbered continuously from the beginning of the
Prologue throughout the Fables. Subsequent references are to this edition and are given
by line number in the text. I have silently amended yough and thorn to y and th. All translations
are my own. Fox reviews the evidence we have about Henryson's life in Poems, pp.
xiii-xxv.
8. Recuiel général des Isopets ii, ed. Julia Bastin (Paris, 1930),
p. 7. This edition contains the complete text of Walter's fables. For a discussion of the extent to
which these justifications were commonplace see Manning, "The Nun's Priest's
Morality" and Wheatley, Mastering Aesop, pp. 151-55.
9. "The Cock and the Jasp," p. 6, ll. 79-80. Although the order of the
Fables has been the subject of much argument, the Prologue ends by pointing the reader
to the tale of the Cock and the Jasp: "And to begin, first of ane cok he wrate, / Seikand his
meit
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quhilk fand ane jolie stone, / Of quhome the fabill ye sall heir anone" (And to begin,
first he wrote of a cock, / Seeing his food, who found a pretty jewel, / The story of whom you
shall hear at once). Fox carefully refutes the idea that the Prologue was meant to stand in the
middle of the Fables (see Poems, pp. lxxv-lxxxi). On this probable order, see also
Douglas Gray, Robert Henryson (Leiden, 1979), pp. 32-33.
10. John Lydgate, TheMinor Poems of John Lydgate, ii, ed. Henry
Noble MacCracken (London, 1934). Subsequent references to this edition are given by line
number in the text. Subsequent references to this edition are given by line number in the text.
11. Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London, 1970), p.196. Lois Ebin reaches a
more tactful version of the same conclusion. See Lois Ebin, John Lydgate (Boston, 1985),
pp. 106-8.
12. This connection is also noted by Fox, p. 195. It is made more plausible by
Henryson's probable training in canon law. Marianne Powell notes that in the Vulgate "scientia"
corresponds to what we would translate as "understanding" or "wisdom." See Marianne Powell,
Fabula Docet: Studies in the Background and Interpretation of Henryson's Morall Fabillis
(Odense, 1983), p. 106.
13. Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley,
1970), pp. 14-15.
14. Walter's collection of fables may or may not have been the only version of this story
that Henryson knew. Fables were extremely widely used as pedagogic tools, particularly in
teaching schoolboys Latin and Walter's version was popular, but as Fox points out, it would be
difficult to prove that Henryson had not read a different version. It is almost certain, however,
that Henryson based his fable on Walter's. (Henryson, Poems, p. xlix. For a complete
discussion of sources, see Poems, pp. xliv-l).
15. In Phaedrus's telling, and in all subsequent tellings until Walter's, the jewel in
question is a pearl rather than a jasper. Walter's reasons for the change are uncertain; Fox, after
studying medieval lapidaries, concludes that there is no discernible substantive reason for the
change and that it must therefore have had to do with meter. See Fox, pp. 194-95.
16. Babrius and Phaedrus, ed. and trans. Ben Edwin Perry (Cambridge, MA,
1965), p. 279.
17. Joseph Jacobs, quoted in Perry, Babrius, p. lxxxiii.
18. This is true of all four medieval versions of Romulus's Fables transcribed in
Léopold Hervieux, Les Fabulistes Latins, 2 vols. (Paris, 1894), 2. 564. 19. Caxton's Aesop, ed. R. T. Lenaghan (Cambridge, MA, 1967), p. 74.
20. See Henryson, Poems, pp. 195-96; and Denton Fox, "Henryson's
Fables" English Literary History 29 (1962), 341-48. For a very different,and
notably Phaedrean reading of this fable, see C. David Benson, "O Moral Henryson,"
page 94
in Fifteenth-Century Studies: Recent Essays, ed. Robert F. Yeager (Hamden, CT, 1984),
pp. 215-17.
21. Petrus Alfonsi, Die Disciplina Clericalis, ed. Alfons Hilka and Werner
Söderhjelm (Heidelberg, 1911), p. 34. English from Pedro Alfonso, The Scholar's
Guide, trans. Joseph Ramon Jones and John Esten Keller (Toronto, 1969), p. 88.
22. The Scholar's Guide, p. 90; Die Disciplina Clericalis, p. 35.
23. These claims have all been widely observed in readings of The Testament of
Cresseid. See, for example, A. C. Spearing, Criticism and Medieval Poetry (London,
1964), pp. 118-44; Lee W. Patterson, "Christian and Pagan in The Testament of
Cresseid," Philological Quarterly 52 (1973), 696-714; Julia Boffey,
"Lydgate, Henryson, and the Literary Testament," Modern Language
Quarterly 53 (1992), 41-56; Felicity Riddy, "'Abject Odious': Feminine and Masculine
in Henryson's Testament of Cresseid," in Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone, eds.,
The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray (Oxford, 1997); and Denton Fox's
introduction and commentary in Henryson, Poems, pp. lxxxii-civ, 338-83.
