Transformation in The Testament of Cresseid Sara Manlowe College

Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid is a story about transformation both physically and narratively, enacted upon Cresseid as a punishment – physically – and – narratively – to make a moral point. The reader first learns that her lover, Diomeid, has left her, and that she has been cast out, a drastic narrative change that the reader is told rather than shown. However, in terms of her physicality, Cresseid remains, at least in the beginning of Testament of Cresseid, where she was at the end of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: whole, healthy, retaining her much-spoken-of beauty. Yet her physicality, too, is robbed from her, as Cresseid speaks against the gods and is not killed for her blasphemy, but afflicted with leprosy in a very physical transformation. ‘The poem shares a wider preoccupation with defilement and exclusion, and with states of being – leper and standing corpse – that are neither alive nor dead’ (Riddy, 232); again, Cresseid is alive, but she becomes something different than what she was. This state of leprosy necessitates her status as outsider, someone who can no longer remain in her father’s society – ‘Throughout the poem Cresseid is an outcast, an unworthie outwaill’ (129), and the action concerns the processes...