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Sixteenth Century Society Conference


Sixteenth Century Society Conference
October 16 through 19th, 2014
New Orleans, Louisiana

The Materials of Religion in Spenser and Donne
Organizer: Ethan J. Guagliardo, University of Notre Dame

Chair: Rachel E. Hile, Indiana University-Purdue University
Fort Wayne
 
“Earnest Irony: Spenser’s Moral Fictions”
Jason Peters
University of Toronto
 
“Euhemerism and the Cult of Isis in The Faerie Queene
Ethan J. Guagliardo
University of Notre Dame
In The Faerie QueeneThe Shepheardes Calender, and other works, Spenser plays with the ancient theory of Euhemerism—the idea that the gods were originally mortal heroes and heroines—to hint that the divinity of his queen(s), including Gloriana, might be analogous to the poetically constructed divinity of pagan gods. This implication is writ large in the Isis church canto of Book 5, which explicitly relates the origin of Isis in euhemeristic terms and dramatizes the deification of Britomart (a deification that results in the worship of Britomart among the Amazons). In this paper, I argue that Britomart’s wild dream vision at Isis church amounts to what I call a “subjective correlative” of Spenser’s political theology. Conventional political theology made the sovereign analogous to God, but Spenser makes his sovereigns analogous to the poetic gods of euhemeristic myth. Just as these gods were conceived in antiquity as something like the tutelary spirits of various nations, so Spenser signals the need for England to create its own myth of national divinity in the wake of the Reformation and the collapse of one, universal authority to represent God.   

“An Ethics of the Dust: How John Donne Invented the Atom Bomb”
Anthony Oliveira
University of Toronto
 
Renaissance Oecologies: Scaling the Human in Shakespeare and Spenser
Organizer: Tiffany J. Werth, Simon Fraser University
Chair: Peter C. Mancall, University of Southern California
 
“Weighing the World: The Scale of Creatures and Spenser’s Egalitarian Giant”
Tiffany J. Werth
Simon Fraser University
In his recent The Science of Describing, historian Brian Ogilive documents an increased passion amongst naturalists in the sixteenth century to discover and catalogue nature’s productions (2006). As natural history became what Francis Bacon understood as a kind of learning in its own right, debates about categorization and new forms for organizing the world—and the humans place within it—became prominent. This paper addresses the vexed question of a Renaissance “world view” (ala Lovejoy, Tillyard, and Foucault) to question how metaphorical models, such as chains, scales, or ladders, manifest different hierarchies and, consequently, produce different human realities. Through a reading of Spenser’s egalitarian Giant in Book 5, it proposes the importance of scale as a concept that checks human exceptionalism but that also insists, rather violently, on “goodly measure.” The paper concludes with a meditation on how this episode raises questions about whether an early modern “oecology” might be predicated upon balance and proportion, connection—or violence and dominion.
 
“Shakespeare’s Stones: Following the Proper Chain of Commands: Talus, Hermione, and the Imperative”
Andrew Tumminia
Spring Hill College
 
“Exceptional Humans, Human Exceptionalism, and the Shape of Things to Come”
Joseph Campana
Rice University
 
Hermeneutics and Poetics in Early Modern England
Organizer: Scott C. Lucas, The Citadel
Chair: Leah Whittington, Harvard University
 
“The Birth of Dead Metaphor”
Roger Jackson
Angelo State University
Since the publication of Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, linguists have debated whether metaphors ever “die” and what determines their death if they do.  These same researchers, however, almost universally refer to the concept of dead metaphor as a folk theory with little or no history; it is something that has always been. My paper turns attention to the historical growth of this concept. As Judith Anderson has suggested, the ways that early modern rhetorical manuals speak of catechresis, the rhetorical trope commonly defined as a transfer of signification when a proper word is lacking, and, more so, the frequent overlaps those manuals draw between catechresis and metaphor, which sometimes is also said to fill a lack, suggest that by the sixteenth century awareness of metaphor as a fundamental principle of language was heightened beyond what much historiography, surmising a purely poetic or deviant conception of metaphor as exclusive to the age, would lead us to believe. Another bit of evidence pointing in the same direction is found in the arrangement of sixteenth-century rhetorics. Beginning with Erasmus’s De Copia (1512), many of the rhetorical manuals published in England and on the continent divide the topic of metaphor differently than do their classical and medieval precedents. Erasmus’s manual adds a category of deflexio, which contains the most frequent metaphors, which he considers to be those expressions that borrow sensorial terms to create conceptual ones (e.g., “I see” for “I understand”) and are already so close together in meaning that their metaphorical nature hardly appears. My paper provides some examples of Erasmus’s influence on later rhetorical manuals and speculates about a possible link to more philosophical works by Johannes Clauberg, Pierre Besnier, and John Locke where similar ideas take on farther-ranging significance.
 
“The Process of the Text: William Tyndale’s Dynamic Hermeneutics”
Tibor Fabiny
Károli Gáspár University
William Tyndale (c1494-1536), Bible translator and martyr, the most prominent representative of the first generation of the English Reformation is also credited to have developed a radically new hermeneutics.
As most Reformation theologians, Tyndaler also rejected allegory and claimed that there was only a literal sense in Scripture. However, he also affirmed that “God is spirit, his literal sense is spiritual.” Thus he echoed Luther’s insight that, unlike in medieval exegesis, the letter is not to be separated from the spirit but the spirit is to be discerned within the letter. His literal sense, therefore, is complex and it preserves the typological or figural sense of Scripture. The paper offers to place Tyndale’s dynamic hermeneutics, especially his original notion concerning the “process of the text” within in the context of the history of hermeneutics , and also relates it to Paul Ricoeur’s ideas of the text as well as to Northrop Frye’s suprisingly similar claim that the “literal sense is the metaphorical sense.”

“Faith-less Steps? Spenser, Dante, and the Role of Faith in the Interpretative Act”
Denna Iammarino
Case Western Reserve University
In the opening scene of Dante’s Inferno, Dante’s pilgrim is lost and at a low physical and spiritual position “that had pierced [his] heart with terror” (I.10-11).   Looking up at the surrounding mountain he finds comfort as the “terror begin[s] to ease” and continues his seeking (I.16, 23-24). Though he does not know the path he will follow, faith allows him to interpret this vision, which motivates him to continue his quest. These interpretative abilities are based on foundational spiritual beliefs—on faith—as opposed to tried exegetical skills and experience.  His faith is an instinct that acts likes a compass, as opposed to a map. On the contrary, Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight is an interpreter who lacks the faith to either ease his fear or motivate him forward on his journey. Once he unknowingly leaves his guide, Una, he can neither interpret his surroundings nor trust his interpretative instincts as he wander further from the truth he seeks. He is a “pilgrim” who has not “add[ed] faith unto [his] force” and as a result is physically, spiritually, and hermeneutically “faint” (I.i.19).  Redcrosse’s inexperience in interpretation, namely his inability to couple faith with contemplation, reveals itself as a lack of faith—in his interpretative abilities, in the character of Una, and, ultimately, in her lessons.  This lack of faith is what keeps Redcrosse wandering, eventually falling into physical and spiritual despair.
In Book I Spenser erects a paradigm where faith has a two roles: it is the instinct and belief that quiets fear and doubt, and when trained to employ contemplation along with it, it is the tool used to successfully traverse and interpret both obvious (Errour in the Cave of Errour) and difficult situations (misreading false Una).  Although faith is an instinct that can be used to avoid misreading, the application of faith in confusing situations (i.e. situations in which there is not an obvious right/wrong) is a trained process because in these confusing situations when one is confronted with the true multifaceted face of error, faith takes “force” or effort.    
 
Does Size Matter? Reconsidering Poetic Form I
Organizer: Ayesha Ramachandran, Yale University
Chair: Brett Foster, Wheaton College
 
“A Queen’s Lament: The Ovidian Subtext of Elizabeth I’s ‘On Monsieur’s Departure’”
Sue Starke
Monmouth University
“On Monsieur’s Departure” (ca. 1581), the lyric attributed to Elizabeth I as a meditation on her failed courtship by the Duke of Anjou, has often been analyzed as a Petrarchan poem, but it is not a traditional 14-line sonnet with a volta. The same form was used the early 1580s by Thomas Watson in his 1582 Hekatompathia, a collection of a hundred 18-line “sonnets”: each poem contains three 6-line “staffes.” This stanza becomes associated, not with Petrarchan, but with Ovidian content in the late 16th century, and this association prompts us to examine the poem within an Ovidian interpretive frame. Elizabeth is uniquely qualified for the adoption of the Ovidian female lyric persona as exemplified in Heroides 7, the abandoned queen Dido’s lament.  The poem employs the conceit, favored by opponents of the Anjou marriage, of the queen’s two bodies to enact a painful choice between the symbolic, eternal, political body and the physical, temporal, and personal body. For this poem, Ovid’s Heroides provide a prior model of feminine subjectivity and desire, as well as an attractive model for a feminine poetics, even if, as is possible, the work itself is not by Elizabeth but rather an act of royal ventriloquism, perhaps by Watson himself.  In either case, “On Monsieur’s Departure” translates pain at a failed courtship into an Ovidian, heroic mode of suffering excusing the queen from charges of insincerity, manipulation, and weakness, while the author demonstrates mastery of the heroic stanza that becomes a structural staple of Ovidian epyllia in the English Renaissance.
 
“Sweet be the bands: Freedom and Wedlock in Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion”
Rebecca Rush
Yale University
 
“The Heroism of Lament from Lyric to Epic”
Sarah Van der Laan
Indiana University
 
Aspects of Edmund Spenser’s Poetry
Organizer: Scott C. Lucas, The Citadel
Chair: Leah Whittington, Harvard University
 
“Finding Cleopolis: Revisiting Spenser’s Cities”
Ernest Rufleth
Louisiana Tech University
Readers Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene hear about the founding of Cleopolis, capital of Faerieland and home to Gloriana’s court, yet no cities are ever visited in the text. The poem’s pastoral and romance setting may be explained as a generic convention, cityscape being anathema to episodic romance narrative; whatever the reason, it would be untrue to claim that cities, especially London and Rome, failed to impact Spenser’s writing. This presentation addressed Spenser’s decision to embrace the worlds of the pastoral and the romance—even as he announces he will cast off the shepherd’s “oaten reeds”—eschewing the emerging urban culture offered by early modern cities in England and Ireland. As many of his shorter poems (eg. Ruins of Time, Ruins of Rome, Colin Clouts Come Home Againe) deal with cities, real and imagined, I placed Spenser’s epic within the context of those works to show that Spenser’s choice to turn away from the city in his masterwork was not only conscious but significant and often misunderstood. I also addressed ecocritical ideals of sustainability and modern urban theories, focusing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the social production of space as a way of understanding the rejection of the public sphere represented in Spenser’s poem. Spenser only focused on one significant urban element in The Faerie Queene, the walls of the few cities he mentions, and this details seems symbolic of his perspective as a native Londoner living apart from the city.
 
“Reading Spenser and Smith: the Emerging Poetic of Navigation”
Sharon Higby
University of Maryland, College Park
 
“Money and the Limits of Allegory: Spenser, Langland, Boiardo”
Yulia Ryzhik
Princeton University
Because allegory concerns itself with abstractions and permanent structures of thought, it has difficulty addressing the contingencies inherent in economics.  A vital and troubling property of money is its ability to circulate indiscriminately—a property that seems suited to allegorical narrative and temporal reading of signs.  But to construct an iconic image of money that would prompt a hermeneutic response, allegory must take money out of circulation.  This paper examines representations of money by Langland, Boiardo, and especially Spenser, as a way of testing the limits of allegory in the face of practical economics and the problem of “right usaunce.”
 
Digital Editions and Editorial Methodology ACP, Bienville
Sponser: Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance
Organizer: Colin F. Wilder, University of South Carolina
Chair: Jason Cohen, Berea College
 
“The King’s Cabinet Splintered: The Impact of TEI Encoding on The King’s
Cabinet Opened”
Travis Mullen
University of South Carolina
 
“The Digital Spenser Archive: Affordance and Deformance”
Joseph Loewenstein
Washington University in St. Louis
 
“Paleographical Research on Petrarch’s Manuscripts in the Digital Era”
Alessandro Zammataro
The Graduate Center, CUNY
 
Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene I: The Books of the 1590 Faerie Queene
Organizer: Scott C. Lucas, The Citadel
Chair: Jean R. Brink, Henry E. Huntington Library
 
“Guyon’s ‘Vile Body’: The Role of the Corpse in The Faerie Queene 2.8”
Eileen Sperry
Stony Brook University
 
“‘[T]hou Saint George shalt called bee, / Saint George of mery England’: Chivalric Iconography and Anglo-Spanish Relations in Spenser’s Faerie Queene
Victoria Munoz
Ohio State University
This essay investigates the profusion of Anglo-Spanish iconography in Book 1 of Edmund Spenser’s chivalric epic, The Faerie Queene (1590), in light of contemporary religious and political controversies. Through examination of the anti-Spanish rhetoric in Spenser’s treatise on Ireland and in connection with his service of Lord Gray, who executed Spanish troops at the 1580 Siege of Smerwick, I disambiguate The Faerie Queene’s portrayal of the Anglo-Spanish contest in chivalric terms. Although Spenser describes Redcrosse as having “sprong out from English race” (x.60.lx), Saint George was not, in fact, a decidedly English hero. He was rather adopted as the patron in various regions of Europe, including Italian Genoa, the kingdom of Hungary and the kingdoms of Aragon and Cataluña in Spain: A project of conscious adoption, the Georgic cultism of The Faerie Queene both idealizes and also reassesses English selfhood in the figure of Redcrosse, the “English” Saint George who is constantly beset by Catholic heresies. Although I argue that Spenser contrasts English virtues with Spanish falsehoods through Achimago’s deception of Redcrosse, which pits the false Saint George against England’s true patron, the poem also resists reductive or superficial readings. Indeed, Redcrosse’s repeated missteps into vice reveal not only the seductiveness of Catholic idolatry, but also England’s vulnerability to sin’s allure.

“Philosophy as a Way of Life in the 1590 Faerie Queene
John Walters
Indiana University
Pierre Hadot writes that antiquity envisioned philosophy not simply as something one learns but something one does. This dynamic idea of philosophy suggests new ways of thinking about how Renaissance authors conceptualize poetry as a teaching practice. Books I-III of The Faerie Queene represent Edmund Spenser’s attempt to promulgate a new philosophy of reading, one intended to prepare a Christian, English audience to live virtuously. This objective is especially visible in the Legend of Holiness, as the Redcrosse Knight struggles to apply his rudimentary knowledge of the Christian faith to life in the earthly world. I trace the Redcrosse Knight’s struggle from his ambiguous introduction, illustrating his inability to harmonize knowledge with action, to his near-fatal encounter with Despair, to its final resolution when his counselors in the House of Holiness help him understand how to live his faith. Moreover, I contend that readers learn new methods of reading from the hero’s interpretive adventures, which readers join by reading and interpreting with him. Spenser’s philosophy of reading operates simultaneously inside and outside the allegory, dramatizing a type of “reading for action” (appropriating a phrase from Jardine and Grafton) he wants readers to apply to his poem and to life. 
 
Bad Spenser
Organizer: Paul J. Hecht, Purdue University North Central
Chair: Rachel E. Hile, Indiana University-Purdue University
Fort Wayne
 
“Learning to Let Go”
Paul J. Hecht
Purdue University North Central
In a series of recent articles, Gordon Teskey has developed a reading of “how Spenser thinks,” that is also a trenchant reading of Spenser’s style. Spenser, Teskey argues, is a poet of “releasement,” or of “letting go”—“whereby the very relaxation of effort and of mental tension gives to his project an experimental character, allowing unexpected structures of thinking to emerge.” This paper asks whether it is possible to see the origins and development of this style in Spenser’s poetry, in particular Spenser’s inaugural book, The Shepheardes Calender. What would it mean for a poetry of releasement to be in its infancy, or to make false starts, or otherwise fall short? How can the traditional aesthetic denigration of the Calender in relation to The Faerie Queene be reconciled to Teskey’s account of the characteristic looseness of mature Spenser?
 
“How Not to Read The Faerie Queene
Catherine Nicholson
Yale University
“The first essential is, of course, not to read The Faery Queen”: Virginia Woolf’s tongue-in-cheek dictum takes to its absurd conclusion a venerable critical tradition, according to which the only way to make sense of Edmund Spenser’s allegorical epic-romance is, in some measure, to avoid it. The Faerie Queene has always been a difficult read—Gabriel Harvey returned the first draft of the poem to Spenser with a list of things he wished his friend would write instead—and successive generations of critics have devised increasingly ingenious routes around and through that difficulty. In this paper, I suggest that the interpretive impasses to which they have succumbed are not obstacles to an appreciation of The Faerie Queene but—just as Woolf suggests—essential to it.  The poem is filled with incompetent readers, from the satyrs who insist on worshipping Una’s donkey to Cymoent, the nymph whose inability to interpret Proteus’ prophecy puts her son Marinell in mortal danger, and Spenser grants their failures surprising ethical, narrative, and imaginative value.  Both within the poem and in its vexed reception history, not reading is the inevitable and indispensible counterpart of reading.
 
“Rudeness, Revision and Experiment”
Matthew Harrison
Princeton University
 
Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene II: The Books of the 1596 Faerie Queene
Organizer: Scott C. Lucas, The Citadel
Chair: Mary Ellen Lamb, Southern Illinois University-Carbondale
 
“What Law is This? Mirabella’s Crime and the Laws of Love in Book VI of
The Faerie Queene
Danila Sokolov
Brock University

Calidore, Courtesy, and the Logic of the Progress
James Ellis
University of Calgary
Critics have long noted the connections between The Faerie Queene and the spectacular landscape entertainments that occurred during Elizabeth’s progresses. Baskervill argued that the first appearance of the Fairy Queen was at Woodstock,  just after Robert Dudley’s more famous entertainment at Kenilworth in 1575. Greenlaw observed that the mythological components of the Kenilworth entertainment were the same as those out of which Spenser forged his epic. Kenilworth was the first great landscape entertainment, and Leicester was the center of the political universe in which Spenser traveled before leaving England.
Critics have identified Leicester behind several characters in the poem, including Arthur, Guyon and Artegall. I want to push that identification forward, and think about how Kenilworth might be influencing Book VI. Surely, if ever man were tormented by the Blatant Beast, it was Leicester. Further, the logic that takes Calidore to Pastorella’s village resembles the logic of Elizabeth’s journey into the highly artificial pastorals of Kenilworth and Woodstock. Leicester, as Master of the Horse, was responsible for the logistics of these journeys; he was a central figure of the court, and thus of courtesy, and like Calidore, he was highly mobile. This paper is, however, less concerned with identifying Leicester with Calidore, than with thinking about how Spenser may have drawn on the cultural forms of the progress and the landscape entertainment in traversing the land of Faerie. Building on new research into the progresses as well as recent theoretical explorations of place-based performance, this paper investigates how the spatial practices and strategies of Elizabeth’s ritual journeys might offer insight into Caledore’s journey, and provide a model for Spenser’s thinking about the politics of plantation and colonization.

“Blatant Beasts and Many-Headed Multitudes: Representations of the People in Epic, Drama, and Elsewhere”
Steven Syrek
Rutgers University
 
Seeing is Believing: Early Modern Representations of Speculation and Prognostication
Organizer and Chair: John S. Garrison, Carroll University
“Merlin’s ‘Deepe Science’: Optics, Exegesis, and Prophecy in The Faerie Queene
Kyle Pivetti”
Norwich University
 
“Through a Glass Darkly: Renaissance Mirrors as Lenses into Speculative Futures”
John S. Garrison
Carroll University
This paper examines depictions of crystal mirrors in a cluster of early modern texts, arguing that these objects operate not to simply reflect the present but rather to speculate about the future. Building upon recent historical research by Rayna Kalas and Debora Shuger, as well upon theoretical considerations introduced by scholars working in object studies, the paper traces how writers seized upon the mirror as a metaphor for imagining future selves and possible outcomes. Examining connections between Donne’s “The Broken Heart,” Gascoigne’s The Steele Glas, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene renders visible a strand of thought that positions reflective glass as an enabling device for literary imagination. Indeed, these texts deploy depictions of mirrors diversely to whet reader’s appetites for future texts, to express desire for support by patrons, and to invite readers to envision new possibilities within the world of the text. For example, such speculative abundance resonates in the The Faerie Queene’s prologue, which promises that Spenser will “sing his Mistress’ Praise; and let him mend, / If ought amiss her Liking may abuse: / Ne let his fairest Cynthia refuse, In Mirrours more than one her self to see; / But either Gloriana let her chuse, /Or in Belphoebe fashioned to be.” That is, Queen Elizabeth is invited to see herself in the character of Gloriana or in the character of Belphoebe. But Spenser, in describing the text as filled with “mirrours more than one,” suggests not only that there might be other reflections contained in the epic but also that these reflections might be frame future possibilities for Elizabeth.
 
“Prognostication and the Holy See: Astrology and the Legitimacy of the Renaissance”
Papacy
Scott Hendrix
Carroll University
 
Does Size Matter?: Reconsidering Poetic Form II ACP
Organizer: Ayesha Ramachandran, Yale University
Chair: Brett Foster, Wheaton College
 
“Helping Philomel to Sing: Rape, Loss, and Metamorphosis in Hester Pulter’s Poetry”
Jennifer Higginbotham
Ohio State University
 
“Spenser, Apostrophe and the Proems to The Faerie Queene
William Oram
Smith College
The paper traced Spenser’s discovery of the lyric potential of the proem-form, from the initial invocation to book I (an overgoing of the traditional invocation, and hence not a proem at all) through the easy conversations with the Queen in the proems to books II and III, to the various experiments with the proem-form in the second installment of the epic, which culminates in the extraordinary proem to book VI. The central concern in this examination of Spenser’s proems is his use of apostrophe.  This rhetorical figure has become essential to the understanding of post-Romantic lyric, and it is equally, although differently, important to lyrics of the Renaissance period.  The paper focus on Spenser’s apostrophes in the proems to books I, II, IV and VI. 

“Epic’s Debt to Lyric: Petrarch & Spenser”
Ayesha Ramachandran
Yale University
This paper considers the formal and historical interconnections between the epic and lyric in the Renaissance, focusing on Petrarch’s early “lyricization of epic materials,” as Thomas Greene famously described it, in the Rime sparse, and on Spenser’s imitation and revision of Petrarch in his insertion of lyric modes back into his epic, The Faerie Queene. Though criticism of the long and short poem have conventionally been kept distinct, this paper will argue for a reappraisal of these seemingly oppositional poetic forms in terms of their intertwining by revisiting Spenser’s imitation of Petrarch’s Rime #189 (“Passa la nave”) in The Faerie Queene. Looking at Petrarch’s use of Homer and Dante, as well as Spenser’s double translatio — of classical epic, as well as of Petrarch, who had attained the status of a classic by the late sixteenth century – I suggest an alternative to the “new formalism,” showing how poetic form maybe read in historically grounded terms. 
 
Religion: Theory and Practice in Edmund Spenser’s England
Organizer: Jean R. Brink, Henry E. Huntington Library
Chair: Denna Iammarino, Case Western Reserve University
 
“Irony and Religion in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender
Jean R. Brink
Henry E. Huntington Library
The life of Edmund Spenser (1554-1599) has received less attention than his poetry, but even so assumptions have been about Spenser the man and his religion. Early in the twentieth century Spenser’s Puritanism was largely accepted. In 1950 Virgil Whitaker painstakingly studied the theology in Spenser’s works and concluded that he was a high church Anglican. Paul McLane contended that Spenser “was a faithful, if conservative, son of the English Church.” There has been some push-back against this portrait of Spenser as a conservative” son of the Church of England. David Norbrook places Spenser in the tradition of prophetic poetry that culminates in the Puritan John Milton. Anthea Hume has revived the view that Spenser leaned toward Puritanism, but John King and others who view Spenser as a disciple of the established church seem to carrying the day. 
Since Spenser left us no correspondence or statement of what his religious views were, this is all interpretive criticism. All discussion of Spenser’s religion is based on literary texts, principally his poetry. This should give us pause: what kinds of poems can be used to support these diametrically opposed positions: To explain these radical disagreements over Spenser’s religion, I will argue that his ironic perspective on religion, particularly in The Shepheardes Calender, has been misunderstood and that Spenser is far less doctrinaire than his readers. 
 
“Revisionist Religious Historiography and Spenser’s Faerie Queene
Cyndia Clegg
Pepperdine University

Spenser critics have long wrestled with whether Spenser’s religious views are more radical than or consistent with those of the Queen to whom his major poetic achievement, The Faerie Queene, pays tribute. The problem here lies less in Spenser than in historians’ understanding of Elizabethan Protestantism. This paper looks at newly discovered evidence from a 1559 Book of Common Prayer to argue that the Protestantism ushered in by the 1559 Act of Uniformity was intentionally more closely aligned with the Edwardian church and Continental Protestantism. From this perspective, Book One’s “Legend of Holiness,” especially the House of Alma, may be seen as remarkably theologically consistent.

“Churchgoing and Recusancy in St. Saviour’s Parish Southwark 1571–1643”
Alan H. Nelson
University of California, Berkeley
 
Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene III: Of Busirane and Book
Organizer: Scott C. Lucas, The Citadel
Chair: James Ellis, University of Calgary
 
“A Cognitive Approach to Spenser’s House of Busirane”
Jennifer Vaught
University of Louisiana at Lafayette

This paper examines how Britomart in Book III of The Faerie Queene gains self-understanding as a result of her movement through a series of architectural structures and their surroundings that provide elaborate rhetorical figures for the body and mind. Throughout the Legend of Chastity Spenser compares bodily and mental forms of interiority to castles, houses, and domestic properties within them like furniture, tapestries, and a mirror. The poet turns to the architectural figure of the besieging of a castle and the violation of private property to represent Malecasta’s seduction of unwilling Britomart at Castle Joyous. At the House of Busirane this Bluebeard-like magician acts as a destructive poet and visual artist who has imagined a sort of cognitive archive, or library of collective memories about sadistic, masochistic, and anxiety-producing kinds of erotic love. Inside his House tapestries, a masque, and ornaments on display like the statue of Cupid are based upon the trickster’s perverse appropriations of literary works by Ovid and Petrarch dealing with sexual desire. Britomart’s continued progression through three terrifying chambers to rescue Amoret and her refusal to be impressed in a self-consuming way by Busirane’s bad love poetry contribute to her education about chastity.
 
“Danger, Pity, the Jealous Husband, and Book Three of Spenser’s Faerie Queene
Karen L. Nelson
University of Maryland
 
“Queen of Judgment: Elizabeth in the House of Busirane”
Mary Villeponteaux
Georgia Southern University

This paper asserts that the chastity Spenser portrays in Book III of The Faerie Queene encompasses not only sexual purity and faithful love, but also judgment. The paper explores the connection between chastity and judgment as exemplified in the Sieve Portrait, and reads Britomart’s adventures in Book III as showing her developing capacity for compassion.  Britomart’s chastity is understood as representing not only Elizabeth’s personal virginity and the political ramifications of her chastity, but also as the loving and compassionate judgment that leads to action in the public realm.  When we adopt this broader definition of chastity, it is possible to read the Busirane episode politically, as an instance of intervention on the part of Queen Elizabeth’s avatar to rescue a woman held captive by a tyrant, an image often used to represent the Dutch.  Military intervention in support of continental Protestants could be characterized as the outgrowth of a wise queen’s loving compassion, a virtue encompassed by Spenser’s definition of chastity. 
 
Humans and Non-Humans in Edmund Spenser’s Poetry
Organizer: Scott C. Lucas, The Citadel
Chair: Ernest Rufleth, Louisiana Tech University
 
“Impersonating Authority: Animals and the Reconceptualization of Anglo-Irish Social
Order in Edmund Spenser’s Mother Hubberds Tale and Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui”
Andrew Smyth
Southern Connecticut State University
In his political satire Prosopopeia, or Mother Hubberds Tale (published 1591), Edmund Spenser calls into question the distinction between human and non-human animals, particularly how social beings adapt to cultural structures. The hierarchical breakdown represented by a fox and an ape taking on church and state offices highlights a willingness to consider strict human social structures in terms of transgressive acts across species and class lines. Spenser, having turned to Ireland as an alternative career site to that of the Elizabethan court, challenges not only the centrality of the court and of England but also the supposed superiority of human rationality over that of other animals. Spenser’s satirical employment of animals to critique the competitive court culture causes readers to question why non-human animals are not—outside of literary and rhetorical usage—integrated more closely into the human social and spiritual structure.
Maria Edgeworth incorporates a significant, anti-court component of Spenser’s poem into her 19th-century Anglo-Irish novel, Ennui, generating a nostalgic yet cynical view of the Elizabethan plantation politics that led to her own family’s establishment in County Longford, Ireland. Edgeworth’s reading of Spenser and his animal tale informs her reconception of Anglo-Irish leadership. The subtext of animal representation in Spenser’s poem expands her vision of political mutuality to include recognition of the co-dependency of human and non-human animals. My essay explores and illuminates the relationships between these two texts, conjoined by 200 years of colonial policies, in terms of animal presences in the literary Anglo-Irish landscape.

“Spenser’s Barbarous Truth: Forest, Satyr, Satire”
Tristan Samuk
University of Toronto
This paper examines Spenser’s imaginative associations between forests, satyrs, and satirists. In Book 1, Canto 6, of The Faerie Queene, Sansloy carries Una to a “forest wild” (6.3) in order to rape her. She is saved by a “saluage nation” (6.11) of satyrs who, though they live without laws, are nevertheless opposed to the lawlessness that Sansloy represents. Spenser emphasizes that the satyrs are both “saluage” and a “nation,” at once lawless and lawful, ignorant and learned. So too, were forests: as much legal spaces as natural ones, forests, like the satyrs, concretize the interpenetration of civilization and wilderness. As George Puttenham suggests, for many early modern writers of satire, nature was the ground of objectivity that gave satiric speakers the ability to judge truth and falsehood, right and wrong. Satirists are, in a sense, “gods of the woods,” says Puttenham, and like the speakers of Ancient Greek satyr plays, they are “conversant with man’s affairs and spyers out of all their secret faults” (120-121). Yet satyrs also get things wrong: Una tries to discourage them from worshiping her, “But when their bootlesse zeal she did restrayne / From her own worship, they her Asse would worship fayne” (6.19). In just twelve stanzas, the satyrs go from fighting lawlessness and praising truth to becoming completely ridiculous. Nature seems to compromise Spenser’s satyrs as much as it helps them, a problem further illustrated by the satyr-knight hybrid Satyrane, who prefers the wholesome forest to the “vain shows” of court (6.29), yet spends his days beating wild animals into submission. Equal parts man and beast, satyrs call into question the possibility of separating the social from the natural, and of knowing the former through the latter. Although Spenser leaves open the possibility of stumbling on “barbarous truth,” it is a possibility that threatens at any moment to collapse into a “bootlesse zeal” for illusions. The barbarous truth of the satyrs, and the contradictory space of the forest, are consequently also the problem of satire: is it possible to know the truth, to locate an objective standard that justifies attacking one thing and worshiping another? Spenser’s satyrs, I argue, are a critique of the claim to objective knowledge that underlies satire itself.

“‘His maisters voice’: Canines, Class, and Disorder in Spenser”
Sean Henry
University of Victoria
Animal studies have taken a lively interest in dogs. In literary studies, human/canine relations in Shakespeare have been the subject of much fruitful work; in contrast, Spenser’s dogs have yet to be brought to heel. My part-title, quoting the September eclogue of The Shepheardes Calendar (1579), succinctly expresses two key early modern attitudes towards dogs that classify them according to their usefulness to human beings, and define them according to class hierarchy projected on the natural world, reproducing the class system of human England. So, “gentle” dogs pursue aristocratic hunting or leisured relaxation, while “homely” dogs fulfill the middling functions, leaving curs to beg for menial scraps. Spenser mentions dogs, curs, hounds, mastiffs, and spaniels many times across his works, and a bitch and a limehound one time each. Apart from the working dogs of The Shepheardes Calendar and the disguised Fox in Mother Hubberds Tale (1591), these creatures appear chiefly in The Faerie Queene (1590; 1596) in similes emphasizing either wildness or servility, or as elements of villainous beings like the Blatant Beast. In general, dogs have negative associations in Spenser, strikingly counter to the class value accorded them by his culture. This paper tracks Spenser’s dogs, examining how far they fit sixteenth-century definitions of doggishness. Their seemingly unambiguous connotations are unusual compared to the multivalent ways Spenser otherwise employs animals in his poetry, so this paper also questions why this species is unusual in Spenser’s practice.  


The Spenser Roundtable
SPENSER’S MONSTROUS PASSIONS
Organizer and Chair: Ayesha Ramachandran, Yale University
Participants:
Rachel Eisendrath (Barnard College)
Kimberly Coles (University of Maryland)
Lauren Silberman (Baruch College, CUNY)


Abstracts and responses to papers for the following two panels appear at How to Read The Faerie Queene: A Forum, in the current issue.
 
Roundtable: How to Read The Faerie Queene
Sponsor: International Spenser Society
Organizer: Ayesha Ramachandran, Yale University
Chair: Sarah Van der Laan, Indiana University
Participants:
Timothy Duffy (New York University)
David Miller (University of South Carolina)
Anne L. Prescott (Barnard College)
Christian Gerard (University of Tennessee)
 
Roundtable: How to Read the Faerie Queene II
Sponsor: International Spenser Society
Organizer: Ayesha Ramachandran, Yale University
Chair: William Oram, Smith College
Participants:
Margaret Christian (Penn State Lehigh Valley)
Joel Dodson (Southern Connecticut State University)
Leah Whittington (Harvard University)

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44.3.74

Cite as:

"Sixteenth Century Society Conference," Spenser Review 44.3.74 (Winter 2015). Accessed March 28th, 2024.
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