Context
Fable stories were a common trope in medieval and renaissance literature. They were told with the didactic intent of drawing moral lessons which could be either secular or spiritual. Many different versions of the stories were created but writers frequently followed understood conventions. One such convention was the inclusion of the didactic moral lesson in a moralitas (plural moralitates) inserted after the fable. Henryson follows and develops this convention.
By today's standards most surviving fable literature is gey dreich, partly because fable writing was a common classroom exercise. Students might be asked to learn fable plots in order to retell them in contracted or expanded form — modo brevitur and modo latius respectively — then give moral conclusions that could be judged or debated either on secular grounds (ethics, character, etc.) or by following more "spiritual" scholastic principles to do with homily and allegory. In this light, the Morall Fabillis can be viewed technically as a work of maximal modo latius.
Readers who were familiar with the genre may have found the tone, range and complexity of Henryson's attractive, variegated and interlinked fable elaboration unexpected, but the method was not without precedent. A similar "trick" with the genre is found in Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale, which is retold by Henryson as Fabill 3 in his sequence and is one of the poem's most directly identifiable sources. However, Henryson's sustained blending and blurring of the secular and the spiritual strands of the genre goes much further than Chaucer's largely secular example.
Read more about this topic: The Morall Fabillis Of Esope The Phrygian
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