Abstract
Orpheus and Eurydice 1 by the Dunfermline poet Robert Henryson (c.1425?-c.1500) presents a moralised version of the Orpheus myth. The narrative depicts how Eurydice, walking with a handmaiden in a field, is attacked by the would-be rapist Aristaeus, bitten by a serpent while fleeing, and carried off to the underworld. The narrative then recounts Orpheus’ quest to locate Eurydice, involving journeys through the heavens and through Hell, and his final loss of her when he looks back before leaving Hell. The poem concludes with a formal moralitas, wherein Orpheus is figurally interpreted as reason, Eurydice as the affections or human appetite, Aristaeus as good virtue, and the serpent as deadly sin. Henryson thus allegorises the narrative into an account of how appetite, when not properly subjected to reason, flees good virtue and leads the soul to embrace sin and carnality.
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Notes
Robert Henryson, Orpheus and Eurydice, in The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. by Denton Fox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), pp. 132–53. All subsequent references to Henryson’s works are to this edition.
Much of this debate has focused on the question of whether Henryson was influenced by continental humanism. Cf. John MacQueen, ‘Neoplatonism and Orphism in Fifteenth-Century Scotland: The Evidence of Henryson’s “New Orpheus”’, Scottish Studies, 20 (1976), 69–89; Roderick J. Lyall, ‘Did Poliziano Influence Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice?’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 15 (1979), 209–21.
For an analysis in which narrative and moral are seen to be in tension, cf. Kenneth R. R. Gros Louis, ‘Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice and the Orpheus Tradition of the Middle Ages’, Speculum, 41 (1966), 643–55. For an attempt to harmonise the two elements of the poem, see J. B. Friedman, Orpheus in the Middle Ages (Cambridge. MA: Harvard UP. 19701. Do. 194–210.
Douglas Gray, Robert Henryson (Leiden: Brill, 1979), p. 221.
For a brief general discussion of this concern, see James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from St Augustine to the Renaissance (Berkeley and London: UCP, 1974), pp. 50–4. For further discussion of these issues, especially as they pertain to the early-medieval Christian responses to the Second Sophistic, a response which shaped attitudes to imaginative writing for centuries to come, see Murphy, pp. 35–8; Charles S. Baldwin, Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic (New York: Macmillan. 1924). pp. 2–50.
For a wide-ranging sample of medieval misogynist stereotypes, see Alcuin Blamires, Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: OUP, 1992). For a full discussion of the connections between gender and writing in medieval misogynist texts, see R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: U Chicago P, 19911. no. 37–63.
On Henryson’ using the narrative to lead his reader into interpretive error which is corrected in the moralitas, see Evelyn S. Newlyn, ‘Affective Style in Middle Scots: The Education of the Reader in Three Fables by Robert Henryson’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 26 (1982), 47–56.
Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: U Wisconsin P, 1989), pp. 21–2.
On the sensuous aspects of poetic imagery as having an affective function, see A.J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd edn (Aldershot: Wildwood, 1988), pp. 49–52. For a discussion much more squarely focused on secular poetry, see also Judson Boyce Allen, The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages: A Decorum of Convenient Distinction (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1981), pp. 21–52.
On the numerological connection between musica mundana, musica humana (the proportions governing the human body), and musica instrumentalis (instrumental music), see Boethius, De Institutione Musica, in De Institutione Arithmetica; De Institutione Musica, ed. by Godofredus Freidlein (Leipzig: [n. pub.], 1867; repr. Frankfurt: Minerva G.M.B.H., 1966), 1. ii. 187–9.
On the sources of Henryson’s description of the muses, see Dorena Allen Wright, ‘Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice and the Tradition of the Muses’, Medium Aevum, 40 (1971), 41–7.
See Dinshaw, p. 21.
See George Clark, ‘Henryson and Aesop: The Fable Transformed’, English Literary History, 43 (1976), 1–18; Daniel M. Murtaugh, ‘Henryson’s Animals’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 14 (1972), 405–21.
On the prizing of secular values in courtly convention, along with more general discussion of Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice in terms of courtly romance and of earlier romance versions of the story, see Gros Louis, pp. 645–6. See also Carol Mills, ‘Romance Convention in Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice’, in Bards and Makars: Scottish Language and Literature Medieval and Renaissance, ed. by A. J. Aitken, Matthew P. McDiarmid, and Derick S. Thompson (Glasgow: GUP, 1977), pp. 52–60.
Boethius, for instance, asserts that the most valuable part of music is the mathematical relations underlying it. This leads him to claim that the true musician is he who is aware of these relations, not he who can best put them into practice, a view expressed in many medieval musical treatises. Boethius, De Institutione Musica, 1. 34. 223–5. See also Jacobus of Liege, Speculum Musicale, ed. by Roger Bragard, 7 vols (Rome: [n. pub.], 1955–73), I, 1. 3. 17–19).
Henryson’s privileging of concrete reality may be related to developments in late-medieval philosophy, such as the rise of nominalism and the Aristotelian problem of the One and the many. See Etienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (London: Sheed and Ward, 1955), pp. 471–520; Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1949), pp. 50–1. For discussion of these and related issues, see Jorge J. E. Gracia, ‘The Legacy of the Early Middle Ages’, in Individuation in Scholasticism: The Later Middle Ages and the Counter-Reformation 1150–1650 (Albany, NY: SUNY P, 1994), pp. 21–38.
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McGinley, K.J. (2004). The ‘Fenӡeit’ and the Feminine: Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice and the Gendering of Poetry. In: Dunnigan, S.M., Harker, C.M., Newlyn, E.S. (eds) Woman and the Feminine in Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230502208_6
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