Spenser Studies Vol. XXIX is out. We are pleased to provide abstracts for this year’s articles:
THE KATHLEEN WILLIAMS LECTURE, 2014
DAVID LEE MILLER
The Chastity of Allegory
for Esther
Building on Quilligan’s discussion of the female perspective in Book III of The Faerie Queene, Berger’s emphasis on “conspicuous allusion,” and De Laurretis’s notion of “technologies of gender,” this talk focuses on “technologies of desire” in Spenser’s Legend of Chastity. These include discourses but also other media—representational apparatuses of all sorts that evoke erotic feeling and shape it as experience and as expression. Spenser’s concern with such technologies surfaces immediately in the proem, as it mirrors (and foreshadows) the Busyrane episode, and later in an allegory that seeks to represent representation along with the damage it can do, as images, objects, creatures, and characters disappear from the narrated action, quite literally absorbed into discourse. Against the pervasive harm of unchaste discourse, Spenser poses on the one hand a utopian fantasy of untrammeled freedom in erotic address, and on the other a visionary quest for the ungesehenmachen (“making-unhappened”) of the amorous discourses dominant in Elizabethan literature, staged as a re-virgination of the culture’s erotic imagination. These concerns re-emerge in Amoretti and Epithalamion and carry over into the 1596 installment of The Faerie Queene, where Scudamore appears as a failed counterpart to the poet-speaker of Spenser’s sonnet sequence and marriage poem. The Dance of the Graces in canto x of Book VI offers a culminating version of the utopian fantasy of unconstrained erotic celebration, located now in the intimacy of the nuptial relation.
DAVID J. BAKER
Britain Redux
This essay traces the development, around the turn of the twenty-first century, of the “New British History,” a non-Anglo-centric critical approach that takes into account the historical and literary interactions of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland in the early modern period. What, it asks, was the influence of that approach on Spenser studies? It argues that, while the “New British History” made possible many advances in our understanding of Spenser as an English poet in Irish exile, it eventually ran into problems in both its organizing ideas and its methods. The difficulties of “translation” in early modern Ireland—both in the sense of literal translation and of intercultural exchange—led to a “conceptual stopping place.” The essay is meant to analyze this impasse and to open a discussion of the way forward.
TALYA MEYERS
Saracens in Faeryland
The Saracens of The Faerie Queene have largely been treated in criticism in allegorical or referential contexts. This article takes a different approach, focusing instead on the literary heritage that informs Spenser’s Saracens and the role that these figures play in the text’s narrative, a role that is far more prominent than appears at first glance. It examines echoes of Turnus’s death in the Aeneid in a number of Saracen episodes, the death of the Souldan, and the promised but absent détente between faery queen and Muslim king. The Muslim presence offers the possibility of another, linear narrative toward which the text repeatedly gestures but which is finally absent from the poem; nonetheless, this absent narrative offers another potential way of viewing the narrative organization of The Faerie Queene.
ROBERT LANIER REID
Sansloy’s Double Meaning and the Mystic Design of Spenser’s Legend of Holiness
Why are the Sans-brothers limited to the first half of the Legend of Holiness: in the final half, as their common mistress Duessa takes apocalyptic reign on Orgoglio’s many-headed beast and aids the final shaming of Redcrosse, why is the Sans-trio remnant abandoned? What is the doctrinal import of foy-loy-joy (then again loy), and why the different targets of their wrath? Two Saracens seem clear: Sansfoy mirrors Redcrosse’s faithless desertion, Sansjoy his joyless glory-quest at the house of Pride ending in a hellish living-death. More puzzling is Sansloy, who kills Una’s lion and tries to rape her, is deflected by satyrs/fauns and fights to a standstill the reformed Satyrane, yet remains active. Decoding “Sansloy” will show why attacking Una so centrally obstructs the holy couple, why this sin is remedied by the house of Holinesse’s Charissa, why foy-loy-joy perfectly fits Spenser’s Christian-Platonic allegory (its stages of sin and of salvation), and why Sansloy’s atrocities never end.
KATHARINE CLELAND
English National Identity and the Reformation Problem of Clandestine Marriage in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book I
This essay calls attention to the neglected Reformation discourse on clandestine marriage in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book I. To do so, it first establishes how medieval Roman canon law’s allowance for clandestine marriage conflicted with the English Reformation’s attempt to create a national identity through a public uniform marriage service. It then turns to how Spenser portrays clandestine marriage as a deceptive practice associated with Catholicism through the Redcrosse Knight’s alliance with Duessa. In canto xii, Spenser rejects the validity of marriages that bypass the proper rituals when dismissing Redcrosse’s irregular union and allowing the knight’s public betrothal to Una to move forward. Spenser thus proposes that England must eliminate the Roman canon law that condoned religious deviance within the marriage ritual if it is to become the early modern world’s bastion of Protestantism. In a final section, the essay explores how Spenser’s negative depiction of clandestine marriage in Book I contradicts his romanticized portrayal of the practice in later books.
RUSS LEO
Medievalism without Nostalgia: Guyon’s Swoon and the English Reformation Descensus ad Inferos
The Cave of Mammon episode in Edmund Spenser’s work The Faerie Queene mirrors Christ’s descent into hell, following his death on the cross—the descensus Christi ad inferos of the Apostles’ Creed, also known as the Harrowing of Hell. By 1590, the descensus had long been the subject of intense controversy, a difficult and divisive theological issue. In traditional determinations of the descensus, Christ’s is a literal descent, a glorious and triumphant event. But many English Protestants interpreted the descensus as a measure Christ’s suffering and humiliation—not a glorious descent but, rather, an expression of the agony of Christus patiens. This essay offers a thorough survey of English theological approaches to the descensus, from the 1550s to the early 1590s, followed by a treatment of Spenser’s innovative interpretation and his critical retrieval of key medieval approaches. Spenser’s is a theological and poetic experiment, testing the limits of human temperance against overwhelming guile. Moreover, his is duly an instructive use of medieval materials—not a reparative or nostalgic longing for the English Middle Ages but rather a recovery of native English poetic resources to focus attention on being in the world, to reshape the contours of Protestant theological debate gone awry.
JERROD ROSENBAUM
Spenser’s Merlin Rehabilitated
In Memory of Darryl Gless
The details provided in Book III, canto iii of The Faerie Queene seem to suggest that Spenser’s Merlin is simultaneously a demonic sorcerer and agent of divine Providence. Accordingly, previous studies of Merlin have at times become preoccupied with attempts to accommodate this problematic duality in a single figure. But demonic sorcery and Christian prophecy are irreconcilable pursuits. The preoccupation described results from the assumption that all details regarding Merlin set forth in this canto are meant to be read as authoritative and true. Yet the “demonic” details are confined to stanzas 7–13, and belong not to Spenser’s narrator, but to the late-medieval Merlin narratives with which Spenser’s readers were familiar. The content and implications of these texts brought Merlin under considerable moral and doctrinal scrutiny during the sixteenth century, and Spenser was therefore obliged to counteract Merlin’s unfavorable connotations if he wished this figure to appear in his poem. Therefore, the demonic details should be read as a description of all the things that Spenser’s Merlin is not. This essay will argue that Spenser sought to rehabilitate his Merlin to conform to Protestant doctrines so that this figure may facilitate uninhibited the genealogical encomium and celebration of Elizabeth as godly magistrate. To do so, Spenser needed to distance his Merlin from the demonic and implicitly Roman Catholic details of the late-medieval texts.
KELLY LEHTONEN
The Abjection of Malbecco:
Forgotten Identity in Spenser’s Legend of Chastity
This essay argues that the transformation of Malbecco into the abstract concept of Gelosy can profitably be read in terms of the Kristevan abject. A psychoanalytic principle of identity crisis, abjection is a subject’s response of repulsion and overwhelming fear upon sensing a threat to its once-stable sense of self. Applying principles of abjection to the episode, we find that, in Malbecco’s act of “forgetting” his humanity, Spenser maps the particular horrors of a complex model of identity: a self-centered identity marked by jealous possession, which perverts the open, outward-directed model presented by Spenser’s figures of Chastity. In the end, Spenser represents jealous possession as a vicious, horrifying pathology of Chastity that ruthlessly erodes its sufferer’s humanity, yet sustains its sufferer in a hellish state of self-absorption. As a complex model of possessive Gelosy, moreover, Malbecco is a figure central to the Legend of Chastity, enabling a fuller reading of Spenser’s representation of married love.
ROBERT W. TATE
Haunted by Beautified Beauty: Tracking the Images of Spenser’s Florimell(s)
This essay surveys the entanglements between True and False Florimell in order to map an ethics of beauty within the pedagogy of The Faerie Queene. The first step of this undertaking is to contextualize the Florimells’ loci among the poem’s “figures of semblance”––the makers of false images in the poem and the chimeras that those enchanters (re)produce. At root, the fabrication of False Florimell in III.viii extends an inquiry that begins with the conjuration of False Una in I.i: how do fictions mediate, or even constitute our perception of truth? Must they? To push this inquiry forward, this essay foregrounds the singularity of Florimell. For few other characters in the poem so powerfully demonstrate the social consequences of seeing truth––and seeing true beauty––through the refractions of fiction. Drawing upon Wittgenstein’s concept of “seeing aspects,” or “seeing something as something,” this reading of the Florimells explores the conditions for one’s ability to see a person as genuinely beautiful or derivatively beautified. Indeed, it probes the extent to which it is possible to discern any manifestation of “heauenly beautie” as a true or a false one. In this light, the creation of False Florimell mirrors and deepens the problems of True Florimell’s construction as a character––namely, as a female character who represents the fraught coexistence of beauty and chastity. Recasting a term from Jung, I regard False Florimell as an “anima-ideal,” a social construct of femininity that men project from within their unconscious upon women. This culturally-fashioned spectre haunts Florimell both before it is conjured and after it vanishes. In turn, the Florimells haunt readers of The Faerie Queene in a way that hits all too close to home: hiding in plain sight amid a play of aspects, there are individuals, beloveds, selves and others, whom we have failed to see and acknowledge.
JEFFREY B. GRISWOLD
Allegorical Consent: The Faerie Queene and
the Politics of Erotic Subjection
This essay examines The Faerie Queene’s use of erotic subjection as a political metaphor for theorizing the relationship between conquest and consent. In the Radigund episode of Book V, Spenser explores the gender dynamics of this trope, as the subjected body is male and the monarch, female. These scenes act as a powerful counter-narrative to the poem’s earlier representations of erotic subjection by showing that external obedience cannot be equated with consent. Radigund forces Artegall to wear women’s clothing and to do women’s work, but this submission constitutes nothing more than slavery. The narrative blends political domination with sexual conquest to demonstrate that compliance is not loyalty and violence cannot elicit love.
MATTHEW HARRISON
The Rude Poet Presents Himself: Breton, Spenser, and Bad Poetry
This essay explores how Elizabethan poets transform conventional gestures of self-deprecation to negotiate the competing demands of rhetoric, the classics, social status, and ethics. To concede (or at least defer) the question of evaluation opens up space for experiment, for what Breton and Spenser both refer to as newness. Because the terms of such self-criticism blur distinctions between shortcomings of style and of substance, they become a vocabulary for close-reading poetry’s action in the world. Thus Spenser uses terms like “rude,” “baseness,” “rough,” and “dischorde” to wrestle with style but also poetic identity and purpose: tracing relationships among his archaic diction and colloquial forms, his interpretive difficulty, his plainspoken didacticism, and his sense of the value of poetry.
RUTH KAPLAN
The Problem of Pity in Spenser’s Ruines of Time and Amoretti
Spenser’s Ruines of Time and Amoretti freight pity with moral and hermeneutic significance. In so doing, these works draw upon a long literary and philosophical tradition that established tragic pity as the test case for debates over the moral and civic value of affective responses to fiction. “The Problem of Pity” delineates the conflict between a Platonic tradition that cast a pitiful response to tragedy as the revolt of the body against the rule of reason and the Renaissance interpretation of Aristotle (via de casibus tragedy), which imagined pity as a positive effect of tragedy, an emotion that reminded audiences of their mortality and humanity. I argue that the Ruines of Time and the Amoretti stage that conflict over pity, though they emphasize different problems. The Ruines of Time explores whether pity helps readers learn moral lessons. The poem ultimately distinguishes between modes of piteousness that occasion reflexive, bodily responses and those that allow for cooler, more reasoned ones. I read the notorious descriptions of the beloved’s cruelty and tyranny in the Amoretti as a de casibus tragedy staged by the sonneteer to humble his mistress—a method countered by her insistence on a Platonic view of the passions in which resistance to emotion is the sign of moral spectatorship.
JEAN R. BRINK
Publishing Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland:
From Matthew Lownes and Thomas Man (1598) to James Ware (1633)
The View of the Present State of Ireland was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 14 April 1598 to Matthew Lownes. In the early seventeenth century, Matthew and Humphrey Lownes printed and distributed folio editions of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1609) and Works (1611, 1613, and 1617), but they did not include the humanist dialogue between Eudoxus and Irenius in these folios. The recovery of William Scott’s Model of Poesy (1599), which contains an allusion to Spenser as author of the View, has confirmed Spenser’s authorship of this prose dialogue. The View, however, was not printed until 1633, nearly thirty-five years after it was first entered in the Stationers’ Register. How do we account for the hiatus between the 1598 entry to Matthew Lownes and the belated publication in 1633 by the Irish antiquary, James Ware? A note in MS Bodleian Rawlinson B.478 links this manuscript to the entry in the Stationers’ Register. It is suggested below that this manuscript belonged to Thomas Man—who was, for a time, Lownes’ father-in-law—and remained in the Man family’s possession until it was given to Ware. If so, then Lownes may never have owned a manuscript of the View, and its omission from early seventeenth-century folios is explained.
GILLIAN HUBBARD
The Folly of Proverbs and the Mammon of Book II of The Faerie Queene
In Book III of the Confessions Augustine associates himself with the young man of Proverbs 9:13–18, enticed by the foolish woman at the door of her house, to eat secret bread and drink stolen water, remaining ignorant of “that which truly is.” Spenser makes Mammon, sitting at the door to his secret chambers, recall this Folly, and Guyon the foolish young man who enters her house. In Proverbs 9 Folly is opposed to Wisdom, just as Mammon and Acrasia in Faerie Queene II represent alternative antitheses to Alma. This discussion suggests how the Christian allegorization of Folly in Proverbs 9 deepens the theological dimensions of the Mammon episode.
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