Robert Henryson's Orpheus and Eurydice: A Northern Humanism?

Abstract

This paper responds to the suggestion that Robert Henryson's Orpheus and Eurydice was influenced by the Favola di Orfeo of the Italian humanist, Angelo Poliziano. It does not argue for such influence, but suggests that the two works have more in common than has generally been recognised. Both works, composed in the last decade of the fifteenth century and in the vernacular, celebrate the poetic vocation and the liberating possibilities of poetic eclecticism.