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Carol V. Kaske
by Timothy Duffy

In bono et in optimo: An Appreciation of Carol Kaske’s Spenser and Biblical Poetics.

It is an honor to meditate on Carol Kaske’s work in this important and erudite book. Written with an informed and archival mind that is softened by touches of cautious humility and the characteristic Spenserian desire to make sure the previous bibliography is respected, Spenser and Biblical Poetics is still, nearly twenty years after its publication, essential reading for the scholar of Renaissance religion. Her work highlights the layered complexity of Renaissance poetics in which doctrinal rigidity is less important than the complexity of biblical reading and interpretation. Rather than try to link Spenser with singular or particular trends, Kaske admirably and, still refreshingly, appreciates the layers of religious thinking and biblical reading that went into Spenser’s poetic imagination. What eventually emerges is a book that fully appreciates the theological complexities of Spenser’s thought and how the contradictions and complexity of literary creation map well onto the built in contradictions and complexities of biblical poetics and commentary.

Carol Kaske [photo Lindsay France/Cornell University]

Photograph courtesy of Cornell University

Kaske’s work did not come out in a vacuum. Her research of many years came out in print five years after the work of another exceptional Spenserian (and one whom we tragically also recently lost) Darryl Gless. (In addition to Gless’s work, John N. King’s Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition and Harold Weatherby’s Mirrors of Celestial Grace are cited as important interlocutors).[1] His Interpretation and Theology in Spenser (1994) offers an interpretation of what Gless calls Spenser’s “dogmatic mutability.”[2] Gless’s study ends with the assertion “that deliberate, even willful, socially motivated constructions of meaning … represent what readers must do in order to discover certainties in the works of Spenser. Such an assertion does not at all discredit the meaning those readers find in his richly varied works” (204-05). Gless and Kaske paint with similar brushes, as both are careful readers of Spenser’s contradictions. The differences in their work are significant but complementary, highlighting the brilliance of them both. Kaske’s archive is more medieval and more Latinate and where Gless sees the variations occurring within the meanings created by a community of readers, Kaske sees “a single ideal reader of successive passages” as discovering these variations on her own (3). Together, these works continue to challenge us to not try to pin Spenser down to any single doctrinal allegiance but to strive to build critical vocabularies and practices that are rooted in the social and private habits of reading and commentary that existed at the time. 

What makes Kaske’s work so fascinating and essential is its defense of contradictory information as being, in contemporary parlance, more of a feature than a bug. That is to say contradictory statements in devotional or theological matters—long the object of criticism and even ridicule—are for Kaske (and convincingly for Spenser) signs of detailed biblical reading. Contradictions on matters of faith are to be found in the legacy of biblical commentaries and the practice of biblical hermeneutics with which Spenser was educated during his time at Cambridge. Contradictions and multiplicities, to modern minds the source of inconsistencies, illogical thoughts, or hypocrisy, are better understood in Spenser’s thought as a reflection of the vast mind of God.

Kaske’s work demands that we revisit even our most basic assumptions about Spenser’s allegiances as well as his theological and political dogma. Though many see Spenser as exhibiting a Protestant fervor and staunch anti-Catholicism, Kaske makes clear that even in matters of Catholicism, a close reading of the text reveals just how moderate and layered his views truly are. Though Kaske’s work is in the lineage of some of the most foundational and traditional works in Renaissance studies, she confronts her subject with such a philosophical sophistication and an appreciation for the in-between spaces of discourse that even the most theoretically-minded scholar would find ample interest in her interpretations. She calls for moderation, for a careful consideration of motifs that seem to contradict or revise themselves over time and, in so doing, teaches her readers how to understand an essential aspect of the Renaissance mind.

For the new or not recent reader, I will try to offer a brief attempt at an outline of this book. The work begins with an introduction that offers a deceptively simple assertion: Biblical Poetics does not simply refer to divinely inspired or prophetic poetry but poetry that specifically mimics, on the one hand, the work of biblical authors and, on the other hand, the interpretive tradition around the books of the Bible. Though Kaske modestly defends her project by asserting “if one lays the Bible beside Spenser’s work as a whole, many similarities emerge,” her work actually goes well beyond proving the case of “many similarities” (2). Kaske is able to present Spenser’s work as mimicking the work of composing the Bible as it was seen through the eyes of biblical commentators, convincingly arguing that Spenser’s theological complexities, though part of his own poetic genius, are reflecting the complexities known to be found in scripture by commentators of the period.

The first chapter, “Spenser’s Bible,” is a gem of condensed archival study. After a useful outline of the biblical material available to students at Cambridge, Kaske centers on the exegetical exercises that dominated early models of biblical reading: “‘Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, / Moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia’ (The letter teaches the events, the allegory [figura, or typology] what you should believe, the moral [sense, or tropology] what you should do, the anagogy where you should be headed)” (15). Arguing that Spenser uses this tradition, in part, she concludes this chapter with the claim that Spenser produces a text that makes its audience “read, mark, and inwardly digest it as if it were the Bible” (17).

The centerpiece of Kaske’s work is in Chapter Two “Structure, Meaning, and Images Repeated in bono et in malo.” This stunning chapter argues for a layered reading to Spenser’s images rooted in the biblical practice and the interpretive work of the distinctiones. Kaske writes that “a distinctio serves for the poet as a bag of tricks, a list of ways in which he can deepen a given image and vary in repetitions; it serves the reader as a checklist of hermeneutical possibilities” (24). Though this writer can’t do justice to this illuminating chapter in a brief summary, it takes on one of the fundamental intriguing aspects of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the repetition of images and motifs that defy clear good or bad connotations, demanding attention to context and, ultimately, a tolerance of seeming contradictions. Praying over beads, for instance, is a sign of evil in Book I, canto i and a sign of holiness in canto x. Kaske concludes the chapter with an insightful point: “In the majority of the image-pairs, Spenser opposes the either/or thinking of the iconoclast. Just as the poet-speaker incorporates in his final interpretation of the laurel leaf both his own first interpretation and the lady’s, so Spenser’s adiaphoristic corrections of the reader’s first interpretations of cups, fasting, temporizing, beads, and altars and their iconoclasts and of Redcrosse’s first interpretation of Cleopolis incorporate them into his nuanced if not entirely consistent situational ethics. The ecclesiastical images have the social purpose of promoting religious toleration” (97). The conclusion is still worth considering and still seems surprising in its well-thought-out simplicity: Spenser is, within a particular practice of interpreting him, a poet of religious toleration. Chapter Four, “Propositional Contradictions and Their Resolutions,” takes on the question of skepticism and the source of Spenser’s contradictions. It considers cases in which the contradictions are not found in the presence of different good and bad exempla (in bono et in malo) but are actually revised later on. Revising what she saw as the flawed habit of some Spenserians, who “admitted that substantive, self-canceling contradictions are present, but have claimed that they are neither intended nor distinctive; rather, they are a function of allegory, language, or representation itself, of rhetoric, of narrative, of a masculinist outlook, or of certain ill-defined and delusory ‘virtues,’” Kaske argues that, instead, the source for these contradictions ending in revision is to be found in the Bible itself (99, 102). She points out that “analogues to all Spenser’s contradictory statements about the will can be found in one place or another in the Bible” (145).  Kaske writes that “I have discovered more complexity than has hitherto been perceived not just in the doctrinal climate but in the habits of reading in sixteenth-century England” (157). This bold claim deserves revisitation. Scholars should continue to turn to Spenser and Biblical Poetics as a challenge, corrective, and, even, an encouraging force to arguments that long to link Spenser to specific theological dogma, political philosophies, or rhetorical traditions. Kaske argues convincingly that for a work as giant and complex as the Faerie Queene, it would take an equally giant and complex work to serve as a source and guide for its composition. Though many of us, rightly, turn to Virgil, Tasso, Ariosto, and Camoes for insights, Kaske reminds us that we should not neglect that other giant work on our shelves: the Bible. We forget her work at our peril; we honor her work with our reading, writing, and appreciation. 

Timothy Duffy
New York University 


[1] See John N. King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition, Princeton UP, 1990, and Harold L. Weatherby, Mirrors of Celestial Grace, U of Toronto P, 1994.  

[2] See Darryl J. Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser, Cambridge UP, 1994. 


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46.2.3

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Timothy Duffy, "Carol V. Kaske," Spenser Review 46.2.3 (Fall 2016). Accessed March 29th, 2024.
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