| Popis: |
Few poems are more insistent about the fixed connection between sex and the stars than Robert Henryson’s “Testament of Cresseid.” Over a third of the narrative is diverted to the poem’s elaborate portraits of the seven planets, and the disease this cosmological court metes out to the unfortunate Cresseid derives both from luminary alignment and wanton sexuality.1 As leprosy was believed to emerge from the melancholic humor, it is no accident that the bilious Saturn and the reflective Luna align to administer a malady that was equally thought to derive from sexual promiscuity.2 Positioning his heroine on the cusp between agency and destiny, Henryson bothered to get the science right in arranging cosmological forces that might easily be said to vitiate control over the tragic fate Cresseid claims as her own by the poem’s end.3 Why would Henryson go to this effort, we might ask, especially since more recent critics of the poem have done little more than acknowledge the precision with which Henryson rendered medieval astrological lore?4 If Saturn was legendarily hostile toward humanity, and Luna simply mirrored the position of the planet with which she was coupled, does this pairing seal anything beyond Cresseid’s doom? Apparently not, if we follow the prevailing critical viewpoint, which largely ignores Henryson’s apparent fascination with the seemingly esoteric field of cosmological knowledge.5 Bracketing this part of the poem, marking it off as a “pagan” set piece in an otherwise Christianized myth of Troy, focuses attention on the redemption narrative that supposedly galvanizes this poem’s plot. |
