The besieged house of Temperance in Book II sets at point the ‘hewing and slashing’ blades of the knights Arthur and Sir Guyon against a climactic opponent: an insubstantial, gnat-like ‘swarme’ urged on by their ‘cruell Captaine,’ Maleger, a terrifying more (and less)-than-human figure (II.ix.15). The traditional allegorical exegesis reads this battle as one between the temperate body and intemperate forces and passions. But it also illuminates an ecological conundrum. How is the fragile embodied human to survive the onslaught of determined ‘shades’ (II.ix.15), whose lack of concrete ‘substaunce’ and overwhelming numbers requires the assistance of a ‘fierce Northerne wind’ to ‘blow them quite away’ (II.ix.16)?
In the world of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Temperance, and its associated quality of balance, can only be achieved by a paradoxical violence, a temper. In late 2020, we might be tempted to read shades of Maleger behind the rapid deadly siege of the novel coronavirus that locked many ‘in long siege us in this castle hould’ (II.ix.12), behind the all-too-familiar threat of police brutality and social injustice, or behind the strange dry lightning that set the western coast of North America ablaze. Spenser’s epic simile that compares Maleger’s forces to a swarm of gnats invites readers to draw parallels between human and more-than-human agencies, capacities, and networks. The simile anticipates much theoretical thinking associated with contemporary scholarly ecocriticism. The vibrant new materialism of scholars such as Jane Bennett and Diana Coole, Bruno Latour’s ‘parliament,’ the enmeshed web of Timothy Morton, the tentacular kinships of Donna Haraway, the ‘geontologies’ of Elizabeth Povinelli, Mel Chen’s ‘animacies,’ or the ‘uninhabitable earth’ of David Wallace Wells, are only a few seminal examples. In our posthumanist moment, Spenser is a poet with whom, as we now like to say, we might think.
Yet Spenser offers readers few complacencies, sureties, or palatable scenarios as to how we might inhabit a world teeming with other forms of life or faiths. So he is also a difficult, unsettling author with whom to think about issues of the environment and its associated concerns of social justice. An English settler colonialist, a minor bureaucrat, one frequently uneasy with Gloriana’s power, and one who could give Maleger a pinwheel of traits that include hunting with a ‘flint, and fethers bloody dide / Such as the Indians in their quiuers hide’ and riding backwards ‘As wonts the Tartar by the Caspian lake’ (II.xi.21, 26), Spenser does not readily tick the boxes we often expect or like. In spite, or, perhaps because, of the difficulty he poses, Spenser, as contributors to this special issue exemplify, is just the complicated, cranky, brilliant interlocutor with whom to stage debates of pressing urgency not only to Elizabethan England, but also to twenty-first century global citizens.
In what follows, readers will encounter engagements between and amongst a variety of voices with Spenser’s ecologically rich, diverse, but also violent, world. They do so in short and sometimes experimental formats, constrained to brevity by directive. The spring/summer issue of The Spenser Review paid a ‘debt to tradition’ and featured the voices of major Spenserians. While some names in this fall special issue will be familiar to readers of The Spenser Review, many are the voices of the future. In order to familiarize readers with the full cast of contributors, we’ve included brief biographical introductions.The issue opens with an introduction by Steve Mentz to the revised contributions to a forum on ‘Spenser, Ecology, and the Dream of a Legible Environment,’ a roundtable convened at the Modern Language Association of America in Seattle in January of 2020. The issue then turns to some serious play with the September woodcut from The Shepheardes Calender. Here, established scholars dwell for under a thousand words in and amongst the shrubs, sheep, mountains, and rickety fences of Diggon Davie and Hobbinoll’s argument to tease out the silent ecological implications within the still frame of a woodcut. The issue then turns to considering Spenserian Futures. In Spenserian Ecological Futures, nine advanced Ph.D. candidates and emerging scholars offer an environmentally-attuned reading of a single stanza or sonnet. The issue concludes with a ‘what to read now’ review by Julian Yates that surveys recent trends under the umbrella of Spenser and ecocriticism. As a recent International Spenser Society executive council member and adjudicator of the Isabel MacCaffrey prize, Yates is an expert guide and provides a shorthand to the seminal, emerging reads in the field.My hope is that this collection will foster a vitalized spectrum of new green, blue, yellow, purple, brown, black, and colours-yet-unknown, as approaches to thinking with Spenser.
MLA Forum: curated by Steve Mentz
Enlivening Woodcuts: curated by Tiffany Jo Werth
Spenserian Futures: curated by Kirsten Schuhmacher and Tiffany Jo Werth
Spenserian Eco-criticism to Read Now: Julian Yates
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Yet Spenser offers readers few complacencies, sureties, or palatable scenarios as to how we might inhabit a world teeming with other forms of life or faiths.
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