The Renaissance Society of America

General Meeting

22–24 March, 2018

New Orleans, Louisiana

 

Spenser’s Pleasures I

Associate Organisation: International Spenser Society

Organiser: Ruth Rosenfeld, Pomona College

Chair: Ruth Rosenfeld, Pomona College

 

‘Spenser’s Garden and The Metamorphoses of Pleasure’

William Allan Oram,

Smith College

The nature and value of pleasure becomes a debated issue in the early modern period, from Valla onwards; Spenser is pivotal to its rethinking in England and his thinking looks toward Milton’s. He returns repeatedly to the problematic relation between physical pleasures, especially sexuality, and the ultimate pleasure of the divine love. For instance, in the Garden of Adonis where ‘all pleasure and all plenty flows’, he celebrates the tragic fruitfulness of a world of generation, and yet his account of Venus and Adonis, matter and form, culminates in the marriage of Cupid and Psyche, and their begetting of a child Pleasure, who traditionally is taken as an image of the soul’s fulfilment in divine love. How does this episode relate these kinds of pleasure? What part does the pleasure of poetry play in the connection? I’ll discuss the Garden canto in relation to other Spenserian texts, including the Amoretti.

‘Argus’s eyes’

Paul J. Hecht,

Purdue University Northwest

The hundred-eyed monster Argus is vigilant against the illicit pleasure sought by Jove with Io, but he is seduced by the pleasures of Mercury’s poetic song, and killed, only to have his dead eyes transformed into the pleasure-giving (to us) and seductive (to peahens) feathers of the peacock. Argus became an early modern commonplace for vigilance, especially anti-erotic vigilance, and his death is also a warning about the dangers of aesthetic pleasure. But in The Shepheardes Calender, Spenser exhibits interest in the fuller cycle of the Ovidean telling where aesthetic pleasure or erotic persuasion are derived from resistance to both, or are in a cyclical relationship. This paper focuses on the way reflection about Argus and his eyes emerges from ‘September’ and ‘October’, eclogues that seem in distant universes despite their proximity, but which are joined by their citations of Argus at different stages of the Ovidean narrative.

 

‘For So Must All Things Excellent Begin’: The Erotic Structure of Life in The Faerie Queene

David Michael Woods,

University of California, Irvine

This paper explores what is particularly Protestant about Spenser’s conception of eros in The Faerie Queene. Through the figure of Britomart I argue that Spenser’s location of thaumazein, or wonder, at the heart of desire leads him to describe the erotic as the foundational category of intentionality and action in the historical world. For Spenser, desire proceeds from an initial instance of astonishment, a disorientation of our senses, our conception of ourselves or our conception of others in the world. Insofar as this disorientation renders the ordinary objects of cognition strange to us, thaumazein reminds us that our desires, like facts, do not interpret themselves. Thus, to set ourselves in motion toward any goal, to orient, or re-orient, ourselves in any space, toward any love (person, place, or future), is to engage in that most quotidian and yet, for Spenser, super-natural act of all, interpretation.

 

Spenser’s Pleasures II

Associate Organisation: International Spenser Society

Organiser: Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, Pomona College

Chair: Ruth Rosenfeld, Pomona College

 

‘Smooth Beauty: Ruskin’s Periodising Aesthetics and Spenser’s Allegorical Women’

Katherine Eggert,

University of Colorado, Boulder

In an appendix to The Stones of Venice on the ‘Theology of Spenser’, John Ruskin curiously desexualises the dalliance with Duessa that leads to Redcrosse Knight’s capture by Orgoglio. Calling Duessa by the un-gendered name ‘Falsehood’ and comparing Redcrosse’s unarmored ‘looseness’ to Peter’s falling asleep at Gethsemane, Ruskin disentangles Spenser’s allegory from an embodied encounter with femininity. The rest of The Stones of Venice reveals why. Otherwise an engaged reader of Spenserian complexity, Ruskin struggles to accommodate Spenser’s treatment of feminine beauty within his praise of how Spenser characterises the apex of achievement before ‘the fall’ into Renaissance aesthetics. What Ruskin’s index calls ‘Womanhood, virtues of, as given by Spenser’ bears an uncomfortably close physical resemblance to the ‘manipulative perfection’ imposed by the Renaissance’s corruption of classical aesthetic form. In Ruskin’s readings of Spenser’s allegory, vicious rather than virtuous women are ultimately more aligned with Ruskin’s aesthetic ideals.

 

‘Spenser, Ruskin and the Culture of Medieval England in the Nineteenth-Century Renaissance’

William N. West,

Northwestern University

Victorian English adepts of the Renaissance took Spenser’s Faerie Queene as a magic lantern by which an imaginary chivalric England of the 1590s could be projected backwards so that it preceded the Renaissance Italy of the 1490s. Such a distinction between England and Rome was also made by Spenser, but for Spenser the difference was confessional and his Protestant England represented the future. Focusing on Ruskin’s description of Giotto’s frescoes in the Arena Capella, with constant reference to Spenser, this paper argues that for critics of the 1890s, Spenser presented a periodisation that went backwards—and that to some extent our current questions of periodisation continue to stumble on this revisionist (maybe insufficiently revisionist) account of the relation of medieval and Renaissance.

 

‘The Pleasure of Hating the Renaissance’

Christopher Warley,

University of Toronto

The Renaissance, it turns out, was invented by the Middle Ages. Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice is among the earliest uses of ‘Renaissance’ to describe an aesthetic and historical period, and the term designates everything he despises: individualism, classicism, secularism. For Ruskin, the Renaissance inaugurates the modern catastrophe, a charge Michelet and Burckhardt would soon reverse by redeploying ‘Renaissance’ to describe man’s emancipation of himself as historical being. And yet paradoxically Ruskin’s sprawling book is not Gothic but an iteration of the modern individualism it would eradicate: all readers notice Ruskin’s individuated, hilarious, prose, so unlike his humble Gothic workmen. Why, then, read Ruskin now? Spenser criticism has marked off as anachronistic nineteenth-century conceptions of Art and History, yet that bracketing tends to repeat, not reject, Ruskin’s nineteenth-century narrative. Ruskin’s Gothic community, as Jacques Rancière observes, is itself a paradigmatic instance of modern aisthesis, not its antidote.

 

 

Embodying Spenser

Chair: Rachel E. Hile, Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wyane

 

‘“Thou Feeble Flock”: Humoral Crisis in Spenserian Pastoral’

Toby Altman,

University of Iowa

In his landmark study What is Pastoral? Paul Alpers argues that the shepherd is the preeminent concern of pastoral—not the landscape in which he works. Alpers presumes that shepherd can be separated from landscape. For much of the genre’s history, however, the shepherd’s body would have been imagined in humoral terms: a porous vessel, continuous with its environment. Alpers risks anachronism, constructing a model of the genre that relies on post-humoral schemes of embodiment. This paper proposes a humoral approach to pastoral, close reading Spenser’s 

Shepheardes Calender. Spenserian pastoral is a site of humoral crisis: because Colin Clout’s body is so porous, his humoral imbalances radiate into his flock: ‘with mourning pyne I, you with pyning mourne’ (‘January’, 48). Spenser thus poses a problem for the genre as a whole: how can the porousness of the humoral body be instrumentalised to secure—rather than endanger—man’s governance over nature?

 

‘Spenser’s Beasts of Burden: Mother Hubberd’s Tale’

Abigail Shinn,

Goldsmiths, University of London

Spenser’s Mother Hubberd’s Tale is a beast fable, a morality tale acted out by animals, and belongs to an old popular tradition of speaking beasts being used to produce satire. In Spenser’s poem, the beast that can speak epitomises the potentially beastly nature of language, particularly when harnessed in order to persuade or advise. The poem’s fabulist animals with their skill at dissembling and flattery can be read as a denunciation of court politics, but also as a warning of the futility and danger of a poet aspiring to advise princes. I argue that by harnessing the often porous and indistinct boundaries between animal and human, Spenser produces a satirical examination of the role of the poet courtier which emphasises how language relates to forms of beastliness and how the punishment meted out for speaking in the wrong place frequently mirrored the torture and maiming experienced by the animal body.

 

‘“Whether dreames delude”: Spenser’s Disappearing Faerie Queene’

Ernest P. Rufleth,

Louisiana Tech University

When Arthur dreams about Gloriana and wakes unable to verify the existence of the absent queen (I.ix.13-15), Spenser mines a rarely considered fairy tale tradition. Gloriana disappears like Colin Clout’s nymphs or like Nature at the end of the poem. Considering the other women who disappear in The Faerie Queene—and in earlier poems such as ‘Lanval’ or ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’—this project discusses the phenomenon, tracing its folk contexts. The disappearance of the fairy woman alludes to her control over her body and her ability to grant or limit access to her person. As Spenser appears to have removed Gloriana from the group of women that ensnare their lovers, this presentation also addresses the political subtext of the poem as it applies to Spenser’s own Queen Elizabeth, another Gloriana who could similarly decide to grant audience or banish from her court those seeking to attain her approval.

Early Modern Verbal-Visual Poetics: Edmund Spenser and Thomas Traherne

Associate Organisation: Society for Emblem Studies

Organisers: Kenneth Borris, McGill University

Elizabeth C. Black, Old Dominion University

Chair: Tamara A. Goeglein, Franklin & Marshall College

 

‘The Cut of History in Spenser’s Februarie’

Jeff Espie,

University of British Columbia

In the Februarie eclogue of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, as E.K. explains in his prefatory argument, the elderly Thenot recounts a fable about old age ‘as if the thing were set forth in some Picture before our eyes’. This paper argues that Februarie pictures age difference on individual, literary-historical and epochal scales: the verbal and visual representations of Februarie’s old oak tree, encompassing the woodcut, glosses and fable, construct an emblem of temporal periodisation. Comparing Spenser’s arboreal emblem with its precedents in Lucan’s Pharsalia and du Bellay’s Antiquitez, the paper challenges recent scholarship which maintains an opposition between historical periodisation and transhistorical continuity, and which advocates abandoning the potentially-constraining category of period as a heuristic. Spenser’s emblem inverts the anti-periodising formula: its imaginative movement across literary time, like its intertextual connections with Lucan and du Bellay, are the preconditions that enable periodisation, not just the results of rejecting its alleged constraints.

 

‘Word and Image Theory: The Example of Thomas Traherne’

Carol Ann Johnston,

Dickinson College

Constructing a sturdy, flexible theoretical framework remains crucial when working in word and image studies. Thomas Traherne’s oeuvre provides useful materials for experimenting with such a theoretical approach. Though his Poems of Felicity are subtitled Divine Reflections on the Native Objects of an Infant=Eye, the preface poem promises a metaphor-free collection. This paradox between title and preface encompasses Traherne’s prose and poetry that details the speaker’s process of learning to see ‘aright’. Comprehending Traherne requires assembling materials from: Protestant iconoclasm; typology; linear perspective; optical science; Aristotelian sight and perception theory; Early Modern theories of rhetoric and poetry; and histories of publishing and authorship in Early Modern England. Misreadings of Traherne through formalist, theological and postmodern lenses abound. Word and image discourse permeates the Early Modern period, providing the most insightful theoretical approach to Traherne’s paradoxically non-imagistic language of vision and arguably to other signature texts of the period as well.

 

‘Spenser’s Verbal-Visual ‘streames of flowing wittes’ in The Shepheardes Calender’

Kenneth Borris,

McGill University

By assessing the imagery of springs and flowing waters in the verbal text and pictures of Spenser’s Calender (1579), this paper will newly show that they constitute a symbolic motif important for our understanding of the whole book and Spenser’s early poetics. Such verbal and visual contexts in eclogues including April, June, August, October, November and December will be analytically compared with a range of early modern mythographical, iconographical and literary sources. Through this motif, we will find, the Calender represents and considers the nature, causes and impediments of poetic inspiration. Although Spenser scholarship has as yet attended little to the Calender’s pictures relative to its poetry, this motif intertwines through both, and shows that it was conceived as a verbal-visual whole, rather like an emblem book. The Calender’s pictures interact with the poetry so that the Spenserian eclogue is a verbal-visual form, and should be dealt with accordingly.

 

Discontinued Allegory

Associate Organisation: International Spenser Society

Organiser: Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, Pomona College

Chair: Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, Pomona College

 

‘“Could I recount them well”: Spenserian Allegory and the Epic Catalogue’

Daniel D. Moss,

Southern Methodist University

That introductory classes on Spenser’s Faerie Queene so often lead to the famous catalogue of trees in the poem’s opening canto ought to surprise us. After all, the conventional epic catalogue—formulaic, self-contained, often plodding—would seem at odds with the nature of allegory as a dynamic and evolving metaphoric narrative. Spenser, however, transforms the few quasi-allegorical applications of classical catalogues—the patriotic drive of Virgil’s list of Italic tribes, for instance, or medieval moralisations of Actaeon’s hounds—into the nodes and pivots of a vast allegorical framework. From the flowers and herbs of the insect-fables to the trees and rivers of The Faerie Queene, Spenser’s catalogues are never emptily conventional, but are constantly at work within the larger allegorical system. This paper demonstrates that Spenser, beyond simply enumerating examples, deploys his catalogues to undermine lazy allegoresis and multiply interpretive options, refining and ultimately redefining the allegorical mode itself.

 

‘Wounding Allegory: Spenser’s Blatant Beast and the Materialisation of Language’

George Pasquale Moore,

University of Connecticut

Critics of allegory have long noted a tension between its logocentric aspirations toward transcendent truths and the materiality of its images and signifiers. Gordon Teskey has gone so far as to argue that allegory is constituted by a fundamentally violent opposition between its upward (anagogic) movements and the ‘intolerable, chaotic otherness of nature’. Drawing loosely upon this oppositional scheme, this paper explores the threat that the Blatant Beast—a Cerberus-like monster introduced at the end of The Faerie Queene—poses to Spenserian allegory. I argue that the Blatant Beast represents a vertiginous collapse of allegorical anagogy into the sheer materiality of language. With its thousand tongues, Spenser’s monster is based upon Erasmian and Pythagorean principles that associate errant polysemy with the lower strata of the body and the material world.

 

‘Spenserian Shame’

Sara Saylor,

Independent Scholar

Readers of The Faerie Queene often associate Spenserian shame with virtue or social control: the blushes of virtuous maidens, the humiliation of dishonourable knights. This paper considers exceptional episodes that resist these prevailing patterns. I argue that shame marks precarious boundaries between persons and allegorical agents; it flares up at crucial moments of narrative disruption and personal transformation, including Malbecco’s metamorphosis into Gealousie and the strange emergence of interior feeling in the automaton False Florimell. Through these and other disparate episodes, Spenser challenges contemporary accounts of morality and affect, including Timothy Bright’s Treatise on Melancholie (1586), and anticipates modern debates inspired by Bernard Williams’ Shame and Necessity. Specifically, Spenser complicates two key distinctions between shame and guilt: first, that shame is a necessarily social affect that depends upon exposure to the sight of others; second, that guilt refers to one’s actions while shame refers to one’s whole identity.

 

Meditating the Female Body in English Renaissance Literature

Chair: Rebecca M. Quoss-Moore, University of Arkansas

 

‘Fetching Genealogies in Spenser’s Antiquitee of Faery lond’

Sara Schlemm,

Cornell University

In the Antiquitee of Faery lond passage of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, we learn that the Faery race ‘fetches its lignage’ from Fay, believed to be ‘th’authour of all woman kynd’ (2.10.71). Fay dwells in the Gardens of Adonis, the place from which ‘all things…their first being fetch’ (3.6.37). Many critics have asked why Fay’s progeny have such a powerful influence on the epic’s sense of time. I argue that Spenser uses the word ‘fetch’ in the sense of ‘derive’ (OED, ‘fetch’, 6c-d) to weave his fairy genealogy into the main history of the poem. What does it mean for Spenser’s poem to ‘fetch’ its own literary ancestry? I conclude by showing how Spenser’s fetching fairies enable time to run in both directions in The Faerie Queene as a whole.

 

Literary Reformations in the English Renaissance

Chair: Elizabeth Weckhurst, Harvard University

 

‘New Hierusalem, New Crusade: Spenser’s Reimagining of the Crusade Narrative’

Jerrod Nathan Rosenbaum,

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Sixteenth-century crusading texts by Catholic authors have unmistakably irenic purpose. But for the Protestant Spenser, ‘Saracen’ figures such as the Sans triplets bear explicitly Roman Catholic traits, while the Roman Catholic Archimago is in league with Saracen knights. In The Faerie Queene, the idea of ‘crusade’ does not involve the actual conquest of Semitic land as it does for Ariosto and Tasso. Instead, crusade is an allegory of spiritual warfare, the goal of which is not the actual city of Jerusalem, but Ezekiel’s anagogic ‘New Jerusalem’. This paper argues that Spenser’s reimagining of the crusade narrative indicates a decline in the appeal of the traditional crusading motif in Renaissance literature. Due to the Protestant nationalism championed by writers such as Spenser– who parallels the heavenly Hierusalem with the earthly Cleopolis– the reconquest of foreign locales bearing religio-historical significance lose their appeal for English protestants seeking to create a domestic mythology.

Rethinking Literary Theory in the English Renaissance

Chair: David Loewenstein, Pennsylvania State University

 

‘Sidney, Spenser, Milton and the Muses’

Barbara Kiefer Lewalski,

Harvard University

What have major Early Modern authors to do with the Muses? Though we tend to see them as merely classical tags, or else take them, often wrongly, as figures for poetic inspiration, I argue here that these poets use the Muses in several ways to explore what it means to be an author. A few references will illustrate. Why does Spenser voice all the classical muses in ‘Tears of the Muses’, and what of Colin Clout’s assertion that ‘The wiser muses after Colin ran’? What of Sidney’s claim to a personal muse: ‘Fool said my Muse to me / Look in thy heart and write’? What of Milton’s projection in Lycidas that some ‘gentle muse / As HE passes’ will bid peace to his shroud? Why are there no muses in Spenser’s most explicit scene of poetic inspiration on Mt. Acidale?

This paper will be presented by session chair Prof. David Loewenstein.

 

‘“All sadness but despair” (Paradise Lost IV.156): Confronting Climate in the Pathetic Mode’

Claire Eager,

University of Virginia

This paper considers settings either at the mercy of the literary emotions or somehow resistant to them. I first examine the ecology of the pathetic fallacy, the climate in sympathy with the despondent Petrarchan lover. Yet English Renaissance literature also offers instances of what I call the ‘anti-pathetic’, settings that remain resolutely out of tune with speakers’ emotional states. Characters find themselves in places called ‘paradise’ but are unable to enjoy the sensory pleasures presented in the text because of their private sorrow. Such instances stretch from Dorigen in the garden of Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale through Colin Clout in Spenser’s June to Satan in Milton’s Eden. In contrast with the expected functioning of the pathetic mode, the settings’ paradisal features seem to enable their failure to comply with the despair of the poetic subject. The uncooperative surroundings provide a test case for the limits of human (or angelic) environmental control.

Emblems II: Symbol, Allegory and the Poetics of Memory in Sidney and Spenser

Organiser: William E. Engel, Sewanee: The University of the South

Chair: William E. Engel, Sewanee: The University of the South

 

‘Kirkrapine’s Labile Allegory’

James Macdonald,

Sewanee: The University of the South

This paper examines the Kirkrapine episode from Book I of The Faerie Queene in light of an interpretive issue raised by C. S. Lewis. In The Allegory of Love, Lewis argues that since the nature of allegory obliges Spenser to present coincidental resemblance between literal Catholic practices and an imaginatively-materialised Protestant spirituality, such images suggest no lingering sympathies: ‘Only a bungler…would introduce a monastery into his poem if he were really writing about monasticism. When Spenser writes about Protestant sanctity he gives us something like a convent: when he is really talking about the conventual life he gives us Abessa and Corceca’ (323-24). As Kirkrapine sets out to ‘robbe Churches of their ornament’ (FQ 1.3.17), what is his relationship to Protestant iconoclasm? How does his death in the jaws of Una’s lion evoke martyrology? Even as Spenser reproduces familiar images, he embeds them in narrative contexts which undermine stable signification.

 

Print, Space and Spirit: New Approaches to Milton’s Lycidas

Associate Organisation: Milton Society of America

Organiser: Elizabeth M. Sauer, Brock University

Chair: Elizabeth M. Sauer, Brock University

 

‘Bitter Constraint: Uneven Development, Ireland and Lycidas’

Lee Morrissey,

Clemson University

Milton’s Lycidas is an archipelagic response to Spenser’s Colin Clouts Come Home Again. Through Spenser, Milton is negotiating a relationship with contrasting ideas of modernity—Reformation in England, Scotland and Wales and counter-reformation in Ireland. In Ireland, Spenser and Milton both absorb a debilitating lesson: Counter-Reformation Catholicism could be more disciplined than official English Protestantism. Spenser’s Colin is not so capable of discipline, and, therefore, returns to Ireland; Milton’s Edward King is disciplined, but discipline does not save him on his return trip to Ireland. For both poets, the challenge they face is the possibility that the Protestant Reformation value of discipline might, in Ireland, be a threatening Counter-Reformation value, one not achieved by the established Protestant Church in Ireland. For Milton, the death of Edward King means losing someone who could have bridged the English reformation with England’s Protestant Church in Ireland (or, maybe, the Catholic Irish Counter Reformation).

 

Cowley at 400

Organiser: Maggie Kilgour, McGill University

Chair: Maggie Kilgour, McGill University

 

‘Parallel Lives: Cowley and Milton’

Maggie Kilgour,

McGill University

In his Life of Milton, Dr Johnson tells with some bemusement Milton’s daughter’s account of her father’s three favourite English poets: ‘Spenser was apparently his favourite; Shakespeare he may easily be supposed to like, with every other skilful reader, but I should not have expected that Cowley, whose ideas of excellence were different from his own, would have had much of his approbation’. While Miltonists have long engaged with Milton’s relation to Shakespeare and Spenser, like Johnson, they have been baffled by his fondness for a poet who seems his opposite in politics as well as poetics. Yet they shared many things in common: both were child prodigies, superb classicists, deeply influenced by the Elizabethans, especially Spenser, and ambitious to reimagine the epic. Looking especially at their earliest publications, I examine Cowley and Milton as competing poets building on the past to lead English poetry in a new, modern direction.

 

Technologies of War

Organiser: Karen-edis Barzmen, Binghamton University, SUNY

Chair: William Caferro, Vanderbilt University

 

‘A “piteous slaughter”: Justice and the Iron Man’s Flail in The Faerie Queene’

Katherine Irene Shrieves,

University of Massachusettes Lowell

One of the most disturbing figures in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene is Talus, the ‘yron man’ wielding an iron flail who serves as squire to Artegall, the Knight of Justice. Spenser’s blending of mythological, biblical and literary antecedents for Talus resists a simple allegorical correspondence. This paper will explore Talus’ flail as well as the iron man himself as technologies of war. Talus is both subject and object, a person and an embodied weapon of mass destruction: ‘Immoueable, resistlesse, without end’, he kills without compunction by ‘threshing’ armies and civilians alike. Talus’ brutality complicates Spenser’s exploration of justice and his rationalisation of English military policy in Ireland. Although the narrator calls the flail a ‘strange weapon, neuer wont in warre’, it does have some historical precedents. Moreover, as an emblem of farmers armed with their own agricultural tools, Talus’ flail ironically subdues the very people whom it usually symbolises.

 

Afterlives of the Posthuman: Time, Materiality and Renaissance Literature II

Organiser: Karen Raber, University of Mississippi

Chair: Steven Swarbrick, Baruch College, CUNY

 

‘Vulnerable Bodies, Prosthesis and the Dismodern Subject’

Richard Godden,

Louisianna State University

In Spenser’s Letter to Raleigh, he describes the purpose of The Faerie Queen: to fashion a gentleman. But how, exactly, is this gentleman to be fashioned? Spenser exploits the limits of allegory to consider the moral, religious and intellectual frameworks in which a good man operates. However, a knight like Redcrosse is formed not just through his journeys in a fallen landscape, but also through contact with nonhuman objects such as his armour. In this paper, I consider intersections between disability studies and the new materialisms to examine the transcorporeality of the knightly body across medieval and early modern timeframes. I argue that Redcrosse’s armour act as a prosthesis, completing his vulnerable body much in the way that Lennard Davis describes dismodernism. And yet, his armour and the other objects he becomes intimate with, including Sansfoy’s shield, turn uncanny, exert a thing-power that threatens to unravel even as they fashion.

Provisioning the Polity: Metaphors, Maps, Dominions, Histories

Organiser: Mary Nyquist, University of Toronto

Chair: Paul Harrison, University of Toronto

 

‘Hematopoiesis: Blood Production, Commodity Circulation and the Body Politic’

Jan Purnis,

University of Regina, Campion College

In exploring changes to metaphors of the body politic in the context of colonial expansion, international trade networks, geopolitical tensions and domestic debate, this paper focuses specifically on depictions of blood production and distribution, what Hobbes describes as the ‘Sanguification of the Common-wealth’. It takes Spenser’s allegory of the body in The Faerie Queene as its starting point, but reads this allegory in relation to early modern variants of the fable of the belly, political treatises and changing medical theory. Understanding how representations like Spenser’s work to naturalise emergent conditions (including new food pathways and patterns of consumption and production) by embodying them makes it possible to rethink body metaphors and medical discourse so as to take into account the material and physiological effects of the socioeconomic and political structures they work to legitimate.

 

Reading and Listening to the Lyric and the Epic: Ariosto, Tasso and Spenser

Chair: Eileen Michelle Sperry, College of Saint Rose

 

‘Wounded: Battlefield Wounds and Treatment in English and Italian Sixteenth-Century Epic Romances and Surgical Practice’

Amanda Taylor,

University of Minnesota

In Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, male and female martial figures hew bodies as much as they break apart the armour those bodies wear. Similarly, in Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, wounding and wound treatment as a consequence of combat occupy a significant percentage of the content. Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene draws on these Italian texts and similarly gives considerable space to the description of wounding and the process of wound treatment. The intimate relationship between wound treatment and combat has received little attention in scholarship on the epic romances. This oversight is problematic because these popular romances provide narratives about wounded bodies that resonated with the early modern imagination. This paper argues that the preoccupation with the wounded martial body exposes an underlying anxiety about the vulnerability of a social structure that deploys the figure of the armoured knight as a representation of its elite power.

 

Retroping the English Renaissance

 

‘The Ovidian Nux and the Poetry of Complaint in Early Modern England’

Jeffrey E. Cordell,

Madonna University

The Nux was ascribed to Ovid throughout the medieval and early modern periods and was generally taken to be an allegorical description of Ovid’s own situation after his exile from Rome. In it, a walnut tree, innocent, but abused and set apart on its property, complains about the injustice of its treatment. The poem was frequently interpreted and recast, from Erasmus’s virtuoso commentary, to Edmund Spenser’s use of it as a partial source for his ‘Februarie’ and ‘December’ in The Shepheardes Calender, to its translation by Richard Hatton, and its eventual recasting in response to the English Civil War by William Basse. This paper will argue that the uses and revisions of the Ovidian Nux offer important insight into the influence of Ovidian and, later, Spenserian poetics and the interplay between these two traditions in the poetry of erotic and social complaint.

 

The Allegorical Rhetoric of Time, Topic and Topography

Richard Angelo Bergen,

University of British Columbia

The Latin rhetorical tradition of antiquity theorised what might be called spatial principles to topical differentiation. For instance, Books V and XI of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria compares the rhetorician’s changes in subject to the varying topographies of countries or the rooms of a house. Such spatial heuristics may be traced to various medieval and Renaissance encyclopedias and handbooks. My paper aims to explore how these spatial principles from this rhetorical tradition influenced the production of narratives, such as Stephen Hawes’ and Edmund Spenser’s allegorical romances. There are threads of tropes in the genre codes between events in these allegories, connecting temporal changes, subject shifts and topographical differentiation; these indicate a fortuitous and self-conscious connection with the spatial ideas instantiated in books of rhetoric.

 

Sidney II: Alternative Boundaries: Poetic, Pastoral and Geopolitical

Associate Organisation: International Sidney Society

Organiser: Robert E. Stillman, University of Tennessee

Chair: Christian Gerard, University of Arkansas-Fort Smith

Respondent: Jean R. Brink, Huntington Library

 

‘Pastoral and Social Spheres’

Joel B. Davis, Stetson University

This paper speculates about the questions: does pastoral in either either Sidney’s or Spenser’s epic romance imagine and invoke a ‘social sphere’ in Habermas’s sense, as a necessary precursor to the rise of the ‘public sphere’? If so, how might it affect the way we think of pastoral in Sidney, Spenser and the early modern period? These questions resonate with recent re-castings of the ‘public sphere’ initiated by Peter Lake Steven Pincus and the slightly older reconsiderations of pastoralism that broke from the new historicist reduction of pastoral to political commentary.

 

Cognitive/Affective Cultures I: Embodying Humors and Vitality

Organisers: Daniel T. Lochman, Texas State University

Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski, University of Texas at Austin

Chair: Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski, University of Texas at Austin

 

‘Arthur’s Memory: Spontaneity and Deliberation in The Faerie Queene’

Daniel T. Lochman,

Texas State University

In Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Prince Arthur appears in all six complete books, giving the whole a measure of coherence. Many appearances connect to Arthur’s memories that appear in spontaneous and/or unwitting forms such as the kinetic ‘muscle’ memory he uses when ‘wise and wary’ as in battles with Orgoglio and Geryoneo’s Monster (FQ 1.8, 5.11) and the affective memories that recur following a dream of Gloriana, the Faery Queene (1.9, 3.4). More deliberative are Arthur’s response to national and cultural memory inscribed in Alma’s Chronicles of Britain (2.9-10), his counsel to Una against despair (1.7) and his submission to collective judgment at Duessa’s trial (5.9-10). This paper will explore how, in varied circumstances, memory evokes myth outside the work, represents early modern ideas about passions of mind and challenges a reading audience to exercise arts of memory in the production of coherent readings.

 

Dreams in Stone: The Early Modern Lithic Imaginary I

Organiser: Lyle Massey, University of California, Irvine; Bronwen Wilson, University of California, Los Angeles

Chair: Lyle Massey, University of California, Irvine

‘Lithic After Life and the New Jerusalem’

Tiffany Jo Werth, University of California, Davis

In Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596), the hero of Book 1, the Redcrosse Knight, after near death in Orgoglio’s dungeons recovers his strength at the House of Holiness where he sees a far off the celestial city, the ‘new Herusalem’ (1.10.57). This essay explores what the Knight’s vision might illuminate about the early modern imagination of the after life that brings to bear a surprising materiality. Despite its heavenly position, this ‘goodly Citty’ is not Prospero’s vanished ‘cloud-capped towers’, built of ‘thin air’, an immaterial corporality (4.1.153, 150); rather we see what some alchemists would refer to as the ‘heavenly body’ or the corpus celeste a city built of a strangely persistent, stony matter. The ‘new Herusalem’ provides an example for how even in the imagined after life, stone actively subtends biological human life.

 

Early Modern Literature and England’s Long Reformation I

Organiser: Alison Shell, University College London

Chair: David Loewenstein, Pennsylvania State University

‘The Friar’s Chronicle (1623) and the Long Afterlives of the Dissolution of the English Monasteries’

Harriet Lyon,

Christ’s Church, University of Cambridge

This paper interrogates the literary afterlives of the dissolution of the English monasteries (1536-40). Whilst previous scholarship has explored this subject primarily through the lens of the nostalgic poetry of Marvell, Shakespeare and Spenser, this paper argues that we might meaningfully think about the resonance of the dissolution in debates about an ongoing ‘Long Reformation’. It focuses on a neglected piece of polemic, The Friar’s Chronicle (1623), which inverts and satirises the monastic chronicle tradition in order to justify the dissolution. The Chronicle thereby subjects the religious orders – the custodians of cultural memory in medieval England – to their own art of memory making. Thinking in terms of a ‘long dissolution’ and a ‘Long Reformation’ therefore has the potential to shed light on the longevity of this monastic genre and its adaptation in the century after 1540, as well as on the literary significance of the suppression broadly conceived.

 

Eco Lit Crit and Early Modern England

Organiser: Karen Nelson, University of Maryland, College Park

Chair: Karen Nelson, University of Maryland, College Park

‘“Into a Cloven Pine”: Ecomaterialism and Early Modern Romance’

Shannon Jane Garner-Balandrin,

Northeastern University

This paper argues that the genre of early modern romance offers multiple ways premodern authors understood, created and interacted with fictional and actual ecologies. Where magical objects, allegorical creatures and fanciful geographies used to be ways of bracketing romance off from the real world, eco-criticism brings into focus the materiality of romance objects and the agency of romance’s strangely familiar landscapes and elemental combinations. Early modern romance provides multiple instances of what Todd Borlik calls the ‘ecological uncanny’: encounters that ‘[erase] the distinction between sentient human subject and callous natural object’ (92). These uncanny encounters are often between human and hybrid nonhuman entities, yet they recreate an ecological sensibility regularly overlooked in critiques of premodern environmental relations. This paper offers an investigation of the various combinations of human and nonhuman agencies found in early modern romance: in particular the tree/human assemblages in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

 

Eros and Violence in the English Renaissance

Associate Organisation: Southeastern Renaissance Conference

Organiser: Shannon Kelley, Fairfield University

Chair: Kirsten Noelle Mendoza, Vanderbilt University

Respondent: Wendy Beth Hyman, Oberlin College

 

‘Daphne’s Assault and the Consent of Trees from Ovid to Abraham Cowley’

Shannon Kelly,

Fairfield University

Often we assume Daphne’s transformation into the laurel spares her Apollo’s sexual assault. Yet in some poems, Apollo experiences pleasure when he touches the tree. With equal conviction, these accounts tell us that Daphne responds to Apollo’s unwanted groping – while she is a tree. Apollo handles the laurel tree, and becomes aroused. The tree writhes from his touch. In his book on elegy, Peter M. Sacks states that ‘Daphne’s “turning” into a tree matches Apollo’s “turning” from the object of his love to a sign of her. It is this substitute turn or act of troping that any mourner must perform’. At some point, Apollo turns from the tree. But the materiality of the tree suspends the turn; a relationship forms before the trope begins. The following talk explores tree consent in Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Abraham Cowley’s ‘Upon Dr. Harvey’, Sidney and Spenser.

 

Rooting, Reaping, Poaching: Reading in Early Modern England
Organiser: Andrew Pettegree, University of St. Andrews

Chair: Joanna Picciotto, University of California, Berkeley

 

‘Uprooting Poems in the 1570’s’

Jessica Rosenberg,

University of Miami

This paper traces a motif through mid-Elizabethan printed poetry, in which poetic gardens are threatened by bad readers who might tear them from the ground – or, in the words of Isabella Whitney, ‘pluck rashly by the roote’. Throughout these collections, figures of uprooting give form to the key threat posed by unskilled readers, a fixation on waste that offers a counterpoint to both literary and agricultural narratives of increase. It remains perplexing, though, that these figures should appear in printed collections, positing the destruction of a singular source when the printed text announcing that singularity is by its nature multiple. The metaphor of uprooting refuses to resolve into a clear tenor: what does it mean to destroy a printed poem? This paper considers the structure of this metaphor, and its conflicted engagement with the materiality of poetry in print, concluding with the momentous uprooting of Spenser’s Bower of Bliss.

 

Taming the Past in Early Modern Britain

Organiser: Meredith Beales, University of British Columbia

Chair: Kathryn Will, Louisiana State University

 

‘Who Were the True Trojans? Rome, Troy and Britishness in Early Modern England’

Meredith Beales,

University of British Columbia

In early modern England, the myth of the Trojan origin of the British people was evoked by supporters of the Tudor and Stuart monarchies and circulated in such diverse texts as Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the 1595 play Locrine. While this myth appeared to place the Britons as ‘cousins’ of the Romans, who had also claimed Trojan ancestry, scholarship produced in the past three decades has highlighted just how fraught that association with Rome could be: in an era when historians, antiquarians and Protestant polemicists characterised ancient and contemporary Rome as barbaric, pagan and Catholic, association with Rome—and Troy—was tarnished. This paper will explore how the political and cultural implications of Trojan inheritance were ‘tamed’ with reference to Jasper Fisher’s The True Trojans (1633), a relatively unexamined play that asks which among Britain or Rome (or England or Wales), deserves to be the true heir of noble Troy.

Comments

• home remodeling contractor 6 months ago

  This essay contends that early modern romance literature provides a variety of premodern authors' understandings of, creations of, and interactions with both made-up and real ecologies.

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