The great fifteenth-century Scots poet Robert Henryson has been, by and large, relegated to the Ivory Tower. On this side of the Atlantic, he is outside the purview of almost all but graduate students and specialists. Even among initiates, very little is known about him outside the approximately 5,000 lines of his poetry that have survived. Thanks to Seamus Heaney’s recent translations, however, two of his works, The Testament of Cresseid and The Moral Fables, are now back in circulation.
Most scholars place Henryson’s date of birth somewhere between 1420 and 1430. The setting for his education is also obscure; the first (unconfirmed but credible) record of his existence doesn’t appear until 1462, when one Robert Henryson, licentiae in Arts and bachelor of Canon Law, was admitted as a member of the fledgling University of Glasgow. He didn’t stay in Glasgow for good, though. The majority of the earliest sources on the poet—which are all posthumous—associate him with the town of Dumferline, where he is thought to have been a schoolmaster at the Benedectine abbey and perhaps a presence at the court of the Stuart kings frequently in residence there.
We do know for sure that Henryson had passed away by 1505. William Dunbar’s “Lament for the Makaris” states “In Dumfermelyne he [Death] hes done roune/ With Maister Robert Henrisoun” (“In Dumfermline he has whispered/ with Master Robert Henryson”). In addition to the concrete date it offers, the
