Duffy, Timothy. “‘The light of simple veritie’: Mapping out Spenser’s Cosmography in ‘The Ruines of Time.’” Studies in Philology 111.4 (2014): 738-756. Project Muse. Web.
This essay argues that Edmund Spenser’s “The Ruines of Time” is, alongside its role as elegy and complaint, a cosmographic work that engages in what I call “spiritual mapping”—a cartographic process that combines anti-worldly discourse with a trans-historical representation of space. By considering Spenser’s poem alongside William Camden’s Britannia, this essay highlights the textual act of mapping present in both works in an attempt to reveal the influence of an international community of mapmakers, including the Familists, who provided a model for cosmographic work that highlighted spiritual and irenic interests alongside the technical practice of representing space.
Goss, Erin M. “A Training in ‘femininitee’: Edmund Spenser, Mary Tighe, and Reading as a Lover.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 56.3 (2014): 259-291. Project Muse. Web.
This essay turns to Mary Tighe’s 1805 Psyche; Or the Legend of Love as it offers an explicit response to the very brief appearance of Psyche as the teacher of “trew feminitee” in The Faerie Queene. Reading Spenser “not as a critick but a lover,” as she writes, Tighe demonstrates the nullity Spenser’s text extends to a woman reader. To read as a woman, Tighe discovers, is to be confronted by the degree to which one’s subject position has been evacuated well before one has arrived. Echoing that subject position, Tighe invites recognition of the degree to which the emptiness of female subjectivity has been posited in the first place by a literary tradition that has no other way to describe or address what woman may be. Ultimately, such an act of echoing becomes a model for reading a text that, like The Faerie Queene, threatens to exclude women from its readership.
Grimaldi-Pizzorno, Patrizia. “Of Lords and Stars: Spenser’s Paradoxical Praise of Essex in the Prothalamion.” English Literature 1.1 (2014): 77-100. Web.
The essay argues that glittering tribute to Essex in the Prothalamion is ambivalent and paradoxical. The author focuses on the Ovidian and Virgilian intertexts of the praise and brings to light Spenser’s hidden references to Lucifer and Phaethon, mythical emblems of pride. For the generic and stylistic inconsistencies, explicit notes of personal and political concern, and the moral seriousness that run through the poem, the Prothalamion is not a mere nuptial song and does not mark Spenser’s return to courtly poetry. On the contrary, under its epithalamic façade the poem hides a reflection and meditation on the vainglory of this world. Spenser’s last poem, like Four Hymns, is a poem of exit that marks the crisis of the Tudor poetics of praise and patronage, as well as Spenser’s own project of paidea.
Pertile, Giulio. “‘And all his sences stound’: The Physiology of Stupefaction in Spenser’s Faerie Queene.” English Literary Renaissance 44.3 (2014): 420-451. Wiley Online Library. Web.
This article is a study of “stounds” in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. The stound, which is a moment of shock or stupefaction, is analyzed first in The Faerie Queene itself, then in the context of Renaissance medicine—in particular, in that of the popular Galenic concept of the “spirits,” subtle vapors that originate in the blood and mediate between body and soul. “Stounds,” it is shown, are intense physiological events that interfere with the essential functioning of the spirits and create a split between body and soul. The twinned concepts of “stounds” and “spirits” provide the basis for a new reading of Spenser’s allegorical poetics, one which grounds its most abstract theological ambitions in a deep awareness of the mysteries of human biology.
Ward, Thomas. “Spenser’s Irish Hubbub.” ELH: English Literary History 81.3 (2014): 757-786. Project Muse. Web.
This article argues that texts by Edmund Spenser imagine an idealized English voice in opposition both to Irish noise and, surprisingly, to Spenser’s own poetry. I begin with a close reading of a scene from The Faerie Queene in which a woman is about to be sacrificed by a group of noisy cannibals, the portrayal of whom recalls many contemporary English accounts of alleged Irish barbarity. I continue by examining the Irish war-cry (known as the “Hubbub”) as Spenser discusses it in A Vewe of the Present State of Irelande and as it appears in the epic. I conclude by exploring some of the anxieties that attend the echoing voices in “Epithalamion.”
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