Abstract
Abstract This article reads the narrator of Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid as a central character alongside the titular heroine of the piece. It locates similarities between Cresseid and her narrator in their unlawful sexuality, physical deterioration, and consequential exclusion from the religion of love. However, while Cresseid is shown to undergo a genuine personal transformation by the end of Testament, the narrator's erroneous reading of the story's lesson suggests that he has missed the true moral point, which advocates for the abandonment of worldly pleasures in favor of eternal qualities. Parallels between the spiritually rehabilitative qualities of leprosy and old age indicate that his moral progress may be ongoing, although at the end of the poem he still resembles Cresseid at the stage of complaint rather than repentance.
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