‘A Very Perfect Forme of a Will’

In the late medieval and early modern periods, the last will and testament was not just a legal document; it was also a kind of literature. A range of poems and prose that engaged with the conventions of the legal last will became a feature of writing in English from the fourteenth century onwards. Sometimes fictional testaments exist as free-standing pieces of writing; often they are found embedded within larger literary texts. They focus on a range of imaginary testators, ranging from figures from myth and history, through notorious contemporaries, and animals, to the devil himself. Bequests were similarly various, including curses, farts, abstract qualities such as peace, and even the body of the testator. This chapter discusses fictional testaments by (amongst others) Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, Robert Henryson, George Gascoigne, and Isabella Whitney.

Introduction

This introductory chapter prefaces the subsequent collection of essays, dedicated to Professor Sally Mapstone. After an overview of the critical field and outline of the importance of kingship and Advice to Princes in the Older Scots literary tradition, the main body of the chapter first examines the centrality of advisory discourse in the poetry of Robert Henryson and William Dunbar, before analysing key scenes of royal reading and writing in Barbour’s Bruce, James I’s Kingis Quair, Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon, and John Shirley’s fulle lamentable cronicle of þe deþe and fals murdre of James Steward, last Kinge of Scottes. It explores both the signal relationship between themes of reading, writing, and rule, and the way in which such acts are transformed into self-consciously ethical activities. The second half of the chapter summarizes and draws together the essays that follow.