ABSTRACT
Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid is usually said to stand in a lineal or associational relation to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. This chapter takes a somewhat different approach. It argues that the relation between The Testament of Cresseid and Troilus and Criseyde is best understood not in the passive terms of lineage and inheritance but in the active terms of judgment and negation. The language of the Testament, in fact, pushes readers to understand its relation to Troilus and Criseyde as less lineal than spatial and temporal—a relation of contiguity, contingency, chance proximity—and to read the Testament itself as a product not of family ties but of an ethical encounter. The Testament’s disinterment of Troilus may also carry profound mytho-ideological implications, implications that suggest the difficulty of separating literary neighbor relations from medieval Anglo-Scottish neighbor relations in general.
