testament

testament, in literature, a tribute or an expression of conviction, as in Thomas Usk’s prose allegory The Testament of Love (c. 1384) and Robert Bridges’s poem The Testament of Beauty (1929). A literary testament can also be a kind of last will and testament, a form that was popular in France and England during the 15th century. The mock legacies Le Petit Testament and Le Grand Testament of François Villon are well-known examples, as is Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid, which completes the story of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.