SCSC 2021 (October 2021) – 2020 was cancelled
The Spenser Roundtable: Teaching Spenser in an Age of Mutability
Organiser and Chair: Sarah Van der Laan
Participants: Chris Barrett, Louisiana State University Rebeca Helfer, University of California, Irvine Joseph F. Loewenstein, Washington University in St. Louis Colleen R. Rosenfeld, Pomona College
Edmund Spenser’s Poetry and Prose
Organiser: Scott Lucas
Chair: Andrew Wadoski
Denna Iammarino, Reformed Courtiers: The Dynamics of Civility and Courtesy in Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland
Vincent Mennella, Arthur’s Dream of the Faerie Queene
Sylvester Cruz, Full of Fire: Anger in Spenserian Narrative
Representing Women in Spenser’s Faerie Queene
Organiser: Scott Lucas
Chair: Denna Iammarino
Sarah Van der Laan, From Bradamante to Britomart: Female Knighthood, Female Agency, and Femininity in the Orlando furioso and The Faerie Queene
Ernest P. Rufleth, “To pourtraict beauties Queene”: Spenser’s Qualifications for Beauty
Henry W. Carges, “But mine is not…like other wownd”: Menstrual Pain and Ruptured Allegory in Book III of The Faerie Queene
Politics and Political Economy in Spenser and Shakespeare
Organiser: Scott Lucas
Chair: William J Kerwin
Andrew Wadoski, Capitalism, Ideology, and the Political Thought of Edmund Spenser
Bernard C. Krumm, Mammon and Justice: Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Political Economy
Scott Lucas, The Politics of Ransom in 1 Henry IV and A Mirror for Magistrates
Lyric Spenser I: Lyric Origins, Lyric Offspring
Sponsor: International Spenser Society
Organiser: Sarah Van der Laan
Chair: William A. Oram
Aidan J. Selmer, “Instruments of Our Understanding”: Rhetorical Sources for Spenser’s Musical Forms
Deborah C. Solomon, “But learne from sour to suck the swete”: Spenser’s Garden Critiques on Reading Poetry
Tiffany Jo Werth, “Whereof the moon and stars were pight”: Heavenly Harmonies and Mutable Lyrics in Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos
Lyric Spenser II: The Labour of Lyric
Sponsor: International Spenser Society
Organiser and Chair: Sarah Van der Laan
William A. Oram, “Unto My Self Alone”: The Last of the Amoretti
Joseph F. Loewenstein, Cursus Rozencohni: Her Anticipation
David Lee Miller, Spenser’s Hovercraft
RSA Virtual 2021 [RSA conference 2020 cancelled]
Claire Eager. “But now both woods and fields, and floods reuiue”: Spenser’s Pathetic Mode and Anthroposcenic Posthuman”
This paper places Spenser in the scene of the Anthropocene, within ongoing conversations seeking to chart conceptual spaces between the efficacy of “the human age” and the ethics of the posthuman (Chakrabarty, Baucom, Mikhail, Mentz). I propose that we reexamine early modern uses of the figure known as the pathetic fallacy, along with its obverse. The pathetic mode presents an eco-logic: the climate in sympathy with the despondent lover. Yet Spenser also frequently deploys “anti-pathetic” landscapes that remain resolutely out of tune with their characters’ emotional states. In “June,” Colin labels Hobbinol’s “pleasaunt syte” a Paradise, but it is one that he cannot access—despite being physically located within it—because he is stuck in a personal microclimate of wintry depression. From this starting point I trace Colin’s affective climatology throughout Spenser’s work, exploring Carolyn Merchant’s “partnership ethics” in landscapes shaped by collaborations among poets, patrons, and the beyond-human world.
Archie Cornish. ‘Spenser in Doggerland’
Ben Smith’s Doggerland (2019), an ecological dystopia set on a gigantic North Sea wind farm, seems at first sight the dark reverse of The Faerie Queene. Where Spenser’s writing advocates a vision of an ascendant English nation, taming and cultivating both
nature and its own moral character, Smith’s ‘planted’ wind farm reveals the destructiveness of such a vision. Yet, as I’ll argue in this paper, The Faerie Queene is an illuminating prism through which to understand Doggerland. Both works present worlds – Fairyland, and the submerged land bridge to the European continent – which
are at once historical adjuncts to this one, and allegorical images of it. Allegory (from both early modern and ecocritical perspectives) helps us understand the mass of vividly described detritus floating through the wind farm; Spenser’s bodily metaphors, his abiding interest in parts and wholes, provokes a startling comparison between the House of Temperance and a wind turbine.
Abigail Shinn. ‘Spenser with Huizinga: Cultural Play’
This paper aims to establish cultural play as an important conceptual tool for analysing Edmund Spenser’s literary world-view by reading Spenser alongside the work of the cultural historian and philosopher Johan Huizinga. Huizinga’s Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture establishes play as the archetype for human culture and argues that all human cultures emerge out of playfulness. Paying attention to the generative and creative possibilities afforded by Spenser’s engagement with popular culture, the paper will address the numerous instances of cultural hybridity present in Spenser’s work as part of a broader history of cultural play and offer a challenge to readings of Spenser’s work as primarily interested in classical and elite literary forms. In this, it follows the lead of Mikhail Bakhtin (Rabelais and His World), but argues for the importance of play rather than Bakhtin’s focus on carnival and grotesque realism.
Conor Wilcox-Mahon. ‘“A Rich Pauilion Ready Pight”: A Version of Spenserian Embowerment’
This paper will offer a reading of a section of Edmund Spenser’s poem The Faerie Queene, where Artegall meets with Radigund in single combat (V.iv-v). I will argue that the poem at this and comparable moments turns in on itself, creating a temporary bower-like space with a fixed centre which insulates itself from surrounding parts of the poem and their temporalities. To detail this process, I will draw on accounts of historical tourneys such as the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and particularly George Peele’s versification of Sir Henry Lee’s retirement tilt, Polyhymnia (1590). The material construction and arrangement of tents, pavilions, fences, and lists provides an important context to how Spenser imagines the poem behaving formally at these moments of intense conflict, as well as appearing directly in its imagery at certain key points. As embowered spaces, tournament fields offer a model of spectatorship for Spenser to draw on, comparable to but distinct from that of the theatrical stage, the materiality of which is very closely intertwined with poetic accounts. Accordingly I will show that book twelve of the Aeneid is also at work in this passage, where Turnus and Aeneas prepare for their own formal combat.
Zainab Cheema. Spenser and Milton’s Ireland: The Spanish Connection
When discussing Spenser’s influence upon Milton, scholars frequently compare the poets’ investments in epic and romance and the allegories through which they construct their mythic-political geographies of England as the imperial Protestant nation. Additionally, both Spenser and Milton imagined the expansion of English empire vis-à-vis Catholic Spain. Spenser references Philip II and the Spanish Armada in Book II of The Faerie Queene, while Milton reiterates historical memories of the Armada in “Quintum Novembris” and endorsed Cromwellian visions of consolidating a global “Britannick Empire” at the expense of Spain in Jamaica. In this paper, I propose to analyze how Spenser and Milton’s colonial imagination of Ireland is informed by the religious and political alterity of Catholic Spain. For both Spenser and Milton, Ireland’s religious and cultural alterity was entangled with the specter of a pan- Catholic Spanish-Irish alliance contesting English dominion over the British Isles. This paper will examine the influence of Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland and The Faerie Queene upon Milton’s Observations on the Articles of Peace and Paradise Lost, examining how Milton appropriates Spenser’s gendering of Spanish and Irish otherness to resolve the imaginative divisions between Britain as nation and empire.
Elisabeth Chaghafi. ‘These few parcels present’: Spenser’s Complaints and Material Form
The original edition of Complaints (1591) deliberately draws attention to its printed form. The preface to the reader initially introduces the volume’s contents as unconnected poems by the same author collated by the printer, but also offers an alternative reading through the observation that the poems ‘seeme to containe like matter of argument in them’, implying they might still have more in common than just the fact that they were written by Spenser. This paper proposes that while the form of Complaints may not have been the result of authorial agency, the ambiguity regarding the volume’s status as a collection, which can also be traced in its appearance, is (and always was) central to the experience of reading Complaints. I examine the ways in which the book’s visual appearance establishes both connections and differences between its elements, and to what extent these were preserved in 17th- and 18th-century editions.
Eileen Sperry. Lyric Death, Epic Death: Carpe Diem in Spenser’s Bowre of Bliss
The Bowre of Bliss has long been a touchstone for key questions of Spenser criticism. Among these is the effect of Spenser’s movement between lyric and epic, highlighted in this canto by an extended carpe diem lyric, Spenser’s translation of Tasso’s ‘Song of the Rose.’ This paper will consider the dialectic of lyric and epic in light of Book II’s focus on temperance. Specifically, my presentation will highlight how lyric and epic foster different models of mortality and how Spenser uses the tension between forms to shape his model of temperance. Lyric death, presented in the carpe diem interlude, focuses on pleasure and sensuous decay; epic death, the culmination of a heroic narrative, directs our attention to suffering and memorialization. The balance of these philosophical and formal oppositions allows Guyon’s quest for temperance to finally resolve; or, alternately, the imbalance of the two ultimately brings the bower crashing down.
Sujata Iyengar. ‘Decolonizing’ Spenser and Milton through Multicultural and Diasporic Irish Verse and Students’ Creative Responses.
Recent calls to “decolonize” university curricula suggest, among other strategies, that instructors foreground voices from across time and space in order to offer diverse twenty-first-century students new ways of making traditional British literature their own. As Ayanna Thompson, Kim Coles, and Kim F. Hall have argued in “BlackkkShakespearean” (Profession, 2019) such strategies are essential if our profession is to continue to attract students to our historical fields. This pedagogically focused paper presents two case-studies of attempts to decolonize my courses: a traditional sophomore early British literature survey and an upper-level Elizabethan Poetry course, with particular reference to the modules on Milton (in the first course) and Spenser (in the second). The first introduced students to multiple old Irish and Gaelic poetic forms (in translation but also through recordings of present-day poets and musicians); the second taught Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene in part through the responses of present-day Irish poets.
Urvashi Chakravarty. So Hard It Is To Be A Womans Slaue’: Race, Slavery, and Gender in Spenser
This paper will explore the intersections of race and slavery, gender and sexuality, kinship and whiteness in Spenser, paying particular attention to A View of the Present State of Ireland and Book V of The Faerie Queene. Representations of servitude in A View and The Faerie Queene have often been critically situated within the frameworks of Irish colonialism and political and sexual consent. This paper will suggest, however, that these texts—published approximately thirty years after Hawkins’ first slaving voyage, and roughly contemporaneously with Elizabeth I’s so-called ‘edicts of expulsion’—are deeply invested both in (queer) re-imaginings of kinship and its effects on the ‘social death’ of enslavement, and in anticipating the fictions whereby whiteness and slavery are co-articulated. Thus, this paper will seek to excavate these texts’ construction of an English practice of racialized slavery already underway, as well as their complicity with national projects of erasure.
L. Lehua Yim. ’Vnpeopled, vnmanurd, vnprou’d, vnpraysd’: Tracing the Settler Eco- of Spenser’s Faerie Queene
This paper examines the way that white settler colonialism insinuates its way into ecocritical analyses of Spenser’s work and premodern studies more broadly. Working across Spenser’s Faerie Queene, this essay analyzes how the critical tradition of “new historicism,” “humoralism,” and “non-human” readings of the poem resist interventions from Irish, critical Indigenous, and critical race studies, especially regarding rivers, lands, and legal relationships within the poem. Taking res nullius and apprehensions of “nature” without placedness (constructed by Peoples) as its starting point, this paper develops a framework for seeing how Spenser’s obsessions with jurisdiction and liquids that soak or move lands might require an amended approach to interpreting Spenser’s (semi-conscious) production “natural features” as colonial and racial constructs. Spenser’s relentless place-making in the poem is simultaneously naturalized and seen as artifice; paying attention to this reveals mechanisms of place-making that undergird colonization, tourism, and certain aspects of ecocriticism today.
Katie Mennis. Passports to the Past? Polyglossia in Latin translations of Chaucer and Spenser
This paper examines how polyglossia is figured in parallel-text Latin translations of Troilus and Criseyde and The Shepheardes Calender across the first half of the seventeenth century. These texts inscribe their polyglossia by combining parallel- and alternating texts, manuscript and print, typescripts and hands, often within single books (e.g. in parallel manuscript translations interleaved in printed copies of The Shepheardes Calender).
The variety of ways in which these translations present their polyglossia speaks to the ambivalent way in which Latin translation reaches forwards into the English literary future (by canonising vernacular texts at home and abroad) as well as backwards into the classical past. I will argue that the formatting of the print editions characterises Latin translation as offering a fixity, auctoritas, and ‘passeporte’ to the past that conceals the translations’ more dialogic, open-minded manuscript origins. I will finish with the annotations in Greek of one exceptional reader, Bathsua Makin.
MLA 2021
[no abstracts available]
Sarkar, Debapriya, Spenser and Disability
Deyasini Dasgupta, ‘Ugly Monstrous Shapes’: Race, Gender, and Disability in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene
Vanessa Corredera, Race Making and the Disabled Body in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene Book I
Vin Nardizzi, Vegetative States in Spenser
Marissa Nicosia, Spenser and Milton’s Seasons
Chris Barrett, How Not to Be a Tree: Spenser, Milton, and the Poetics of Climate Emergency
James Carson Nohrnberg, Poetic Astronomy on Trial in Spenser and Milton
Benjamin Parris, Spenser, Milton, and the Vital Science of Sleep
Colleen Rosenfeld and Katherine Schaap Williams, Form and Deformity in Edmund Spenser’s
Kalamazoo 2021
Spenser at Kalamazoo
Organiser: Sean Henry, Jennifer Vaught, David Wilson-Okamura
Presider: Denna Iammarino
Elisabeth Chaghafi, “He hath taken greate paynes”: Harvey’s Stylistic Revisions and the Letter to Immerito/Beneuolo
Anna N. Ullmann, Spenser the “Poet Historical”: Redefining The Faerie Queene and Early Modern Historiography
John Walters, Be Angry and Sin Not: Royal Anger in the Legend of Justice
Respondent: Lauren Silberman
Spenser at Kalamazoo II
Organiser: Susannah Brietz Monta, Brad Tuggle, Jennifer Vaught
Presider: Tamara Goeglein
Judith H. Anderson, The Adventures of Scudamour, “Cupids Man” in The Faerie Queene
Margo Kolenda-Mason, Spenser’s “Fruitlesse Worke”
Judith M. C. Owens, “And set by her to watch, and set by her to weep”: Glauce’s Healing Arts
Spenser at Kalamazoo III: The Kathleen Williams Lecture
Sponsor: Spenser at Kalamazoo Organizer: Sean Henry, David Wilson-Okamura, Jennifer Vaught
Presider: Mark Jones
Donal Stump, Spenser’s Elizabeth: (Mis)representing the Personality of the Queen
Respondents: William Oram and Lauren Silberman
Spenser and Animal Life: A Symposium
University of Sussex Centre for Early Modern and Medieval Studies (online)
18 June 2021
Jonathan Thurston, Ravenous Race: Nature versus Nurture and Spenser’s Faerie Queene
Even a cursory glance at early modern race studies reveals concerns with interracial progeny. Many scholars today regard ecocritical race studies in the context of the early modern period with dismissal; however, by honing in on key words such as “breed” and “race”—which, while not being the exact concept it is today, very much were frequently used terms—one can begin to see the racial discourse revolving around pre-Darwinian questions of human origin and nature. Edmund Spenser, in his Faerie Queene, uses “race” to invoke one’s true “nature,” implying that people are inherently of different classes. “Nurture” does not factor in with Spenser’s conception of race, and that manifests similarly in both his human race and colored animal depictions.
This paper traces the background of the nature–nurture discussion of the late sixteenth century (particularly examining Shakespeare’s use of the phrase in The Tempest and Richard Barnfield’s poems) before grounding it in the context of animals and race. What follows is a close reading of Spenser’s use of terms like “breed” and “race” as a means of connecting human races, animal color, and the understanding of one’s nature as a defining characteristic of those physical attributes. The conclusion examines these terms as they appear in documents pertaining to treatment to non-white races in the early modern period to reveal the cultural awareness of “breed.”
Kat Addis, The Erotic Politics of Hunting in Spenser’s Amoretti, Sonnet 67
This paper offers a close reading of Spenser’s sonnet 67 in the Amoretti which lays out how the sonnet participates in an erotic discourse of hunting that underlies technologies of slavery, race and gender. Building on Sylvia Wynter’s discussion of race as the problem of the “genre of the human” and Grégoire Chamayou’s discussion of the “dialectic of the hunter and the hunted” in Manhunts, it teases out two related strands in the sonnet: the material history of “manhunting” that Spenser’s metaphoric deer-hunt evokes, and the justificatory fantasy that the animalistic human in an Aristotelian schema (the slave, woman or child) will come to desire their own captivity. It relates these strands to the connection between animal life, slavery and eros in classical philosophy, showing how Spenser’s representation of desire is implicated in technologies of political violence. Overall, this reading responds to the provocation of Loewenstein’s contrast between “affective” and “theoretical” engagements with animal life by rejecting that dichotomy, arguing instead that Spenser’s engagement can be understood as based on a kind of affect theory.
Bethany Dubow, Spenser’s Toadstool Poetics
In the final eclogue to The Shepheardes Calender, Colin Clout laments that where he once sought ‘the honey Bee, / Working her formall rowmes in Wexen frame’ he now finds ‘The grieslie Todestoole growne’ and ‘loathed Paddocks lording on the same’. Whilst many critics have read Spenser’s honeycomb as a self-reflexive metaphor for poetic form, none have considered the narrative of displacement and disfigurement that is its immediate context. That criticism has been weighted towards an analysis of the bee’s ‘formall rowmes’ is not surprising given the centrality of apian imagery to renaissance classicism. But the ‘grieslie Todestoole’ was of significance in early modern culture, too, albeit in the context of a quite different (even oppositional) tradition. In this period, popular folklore associated toadstools with fairies as well as, more generally, deformity and infection.
Therefore, rather than elaborating the analogy, as others have done, between Spenser’s humanist poetics and those of the honeycomb, this paper interprets the ‘grieslie Todestoole growne’ as an invitation to trace the toadstool poetics of The Faerie Queene. Spenser had likely begun drafting The Faerie Queene at the point at which he was preparing the Calender for publication, and it is even possible that the displacement of the honeycomb by the fairy toadstool in the Calender’s final eclogue anticipates his embrace of fairy themes. I propose that Spenser’s toadstool poetics are traceable not only in his debt to a popular and native literary tradition which existed in complicated relation to the project of sixteenth-century humanism, but also in those elements of his verse which tend towards excessive proliferation, disproportion and infectious opportunism: I am interested in how the fungal forms of Spenser’s rhyme and alliteration are instinct with the peculiar growth patterns of The Faerie Queene.
Richard Danson Brown, Scorned little creatures?: insects and others in Complaints (1591)
The beast fables at the heart of Complaints—Mother Hubberds Tale and Muiopotmos—are classic embodiments of the problematics of Spenser’s animal writing. Who do the amoral tricksters, the Fox and the Ape, represent in their assault on the Elizabethan social structure? Who, or what, lies behind the mock-heroic antagonism between the butterfly Clarion and the spider Aragnoll? The dedicatory sonnet of the translation, Virgils Gnat, gives some hints in its suggestion that the poem allegorises relationships between poets and patrons. This paper aims to go beyond these more well-known texts to explore the broader animal poetics within Complaints. This covers inter alia satirical foxes and badgers in The Ruines of Time, dying lions in Ruines of Rome, and the miniature bestiaries of Visions of the Worlds Vanitie, where ‘scorned little creature[s]’ undermine ‘mighty’ opponents. The central questions this paper explores are firstly how Spenser conceptualises animals—to what extent are they personae presented empathetically, as objects for readerly engagement? Secondly, what is the overlap between these complex, antagonistic animal protagonists and the complaint mode? My suggestion is that the generic swerve from The Faerie Queene (1590) to Complaints (1591) is itself a move from the large to the small, which is poetically mapped in these enigmatic emblems of resistance, subversion and evanescence.
Namratha Rao, Thinking with Plants in the Faerie Queene
Spenserian engagements with questions of animal life have emerged in two significant directions. One is that animals are compelling to Spenser principally for their symbolic potential; this is to say, they are remarkable not for their animality, but instead for their capacity to be substituted in the service of other kinds of meaning. The other deals in moments in which creatures—hogs, butterflies and horses, come to mind—conspicuously fail to mean, fail to be suitably conceptually instrumentalized. This refusal of legibility within the poem’s figurative schema affords affective power, but is usually accompanied by the critical implication that interpretation is rendered ridiculous or impossible: thinking (associated with ordering) is replaced with feeling (associated with disordering). This paper is interested in the apparent division between thinking and interpretation, on the one hand, and feeling on the other, that Spenser’s animals tend to provoke. It suggests that the figure of the plant and the language of vegetal life mediates, but does not synthesize, foundational polarities of The Faerie Queene (e.g. thinking and feeling, abstraction and narrative, ideas and matter). In the perpetual play of contradiction, and the retreat from false resolution, Spenser’s plants make possible critiques—and so reimaginings—of the poem’s hierarchical forms.
Conor Wilcox-Mahon, Courses and Coursers in The Faerie Queene
This paper would consider the extended analogy between the movement of horses within The Faerie Queene and the poem’s own narrative motion. Horses bear the poem’s characters from episode to episode, overtaking characters, and enabling digressions. Their ability to change speed and chart direction is consistently important to how the narrative, particularly in its more intricate parts, is able to cohere. As ‘coursers’, indeed, they are always in view whenever the issue of the poem’s narrative ‘courses’ is raised, as well as those of its characters and readers.
A starting point will be the end of book two, canto three, where the (stolen) ‘valiant courser’ ridden by Braggadocchio disdains to get moving again as the poem does. The horse refuses ‘to tread in dew degree, | But chaufd and fom’d’. The paper will examine the concept of ‘dew degree’, and argue that horses expose to us different strands of narrative pacing, in animal as well as human steps. It will also draw attention to their potential to resist or disrupt diegetic flow. Lastly, it will consider what happens to the narrative fabric when, as so often in the poem, horses bend their courses towards each other in combat.
Abigail Shinn, Spenser’s ‘apish crue’: aping in Prosopopoiea or Mother Hubberds Tale
For not by that which is, the world now deemeth,
(As it was wont) but by that same that seemeth. 649-50
This paper will explore the hinge between prosopopoiea and aping in Mother Hubberds Tale. The poem is a self-declared exercise in prosopopoeia, the rhetorical figure described by George Puttenham as a ‘Counterfeit impersonation’. Despite the poem’s emphasis on prosopopoiea, the figure runs in tandem with the more negative and unstable concept of ‘aping’, understood as poor or failed mimicry. This is the term used by the virtuous courtier poet when bemoaning the dissimulation of false flatterers, those he calls the ‘Apish crue’ (731). The paper will ask what happens when rhetorical figuration meets the ape and consider how thinking with the animal helps Spenser to explore the expectations and limits of mimesis. Innately connected to the construction and inhabiting of character and voice, for Gavin Alexander prosopopoiea ‘engages with, and is implicated in, many different degrees and forms of personation’. This multi-layered creation of character is reflected in MHT, where we see not only animals being imbued with the ability to speak and act like humans but a number of further levels of personation. These include the frame tale, in which the narrator adopts the voice of Mother Hubberd, and the fox and his ape companion’s various performances as they ascend the social hierarchy, playing at being soldiers and courtiers before stealing the throne of the lion king. These actions of seeming, in which the two animals don and doff different costumes and poses, are accompanied by broader processes of imitation related to the role of animals in different literary spheres. Sir Reynold both is and is not the famous Reynarde the fox from the ubiquitous beast fable, while the ape recalls the performing apes used for spectacle in playhouses and baiting rings and who were often dressed to look like men. Spenser’s construction of a beast fable in which an ape will become king thus serves to push aping counterfeits to the fore of his exercise in prosopopoiea. Where prosopopoiea meets aping is where the animal reigns and arguably it is the animal who reveals the limits and dangers of inhabiting someone else’s character and voice.
Andrew Hadfield, Spenser’s Real Sheep
We know that Petrarch had a cat, as did Montaigne; that Henry VIII liked dogs, his favourites being Cut and Ball, as did his daughter, Elizabeth; that Mary Queen of Scots kept lapdogs and Catherine Brandon had a devoted dog that followed her around that she called after the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Gardiner. We also know that there was a menagerie of exotic animals in the Tower of London and that the late Tudors were habitually cruel to animals that they used for sport. However, we do not know a great deal about Spenser and his attitude to animals: whether he kept pets, how he treated them if he did, what he thought about their rights and sentient consciousness. They appear in significant numbers in his writings – pigs, reptiles, birds, fish, and so on – so they were clearly good to think with, as Levi-Strauss has it. The only animals we can be sure he had longstanding relationships with are horses – because he had to be able to ride in as secretary to Lord Grey in Ireland – and sheep, which he would have had on his estate in Ireland and which, perhaps coincidently, made the fortune of the Spencer family to whom he claimed to be related.
But was there a relationship between the symbolic animals he represented in his work and real animals he encountered in his everyday life? In this paper I will explore this issue looking particularly at Spenser’s literary representations of sheep and horses to see if these tell us anything about his thinking on animals.
Raphael Lyne, Spenser’s Wings
In The Faerie Queene there are dozens of pairs of wings. These often belong to real and imaginary creatures participating in the fictional world, but they also arise in similes and metaphors, where they are carried by animals or by abstract concepts. Thus they provide a way in to the exchanges between the different levels at which animals impinge on Spenser’s imagination, materialized to different degrees but connecting in conceptual ways (swiftness, flight, height, lightness – but also, in some cases, awkwardness). The different creatures that can have wings (birds, insects, dragons) make an interesting group, especially when added to the humans (fleeing more than flying and non-creatures (wind, writing, etc.)). The interpretive framework offered by Guillemette Bolens’s The Style of Gestures, which discusses the role of ‘sensori-motor resonance’ (the ways we respond to movements in literature by mentally simulating those movements and their meanings), is useful here. Readers don’t have wings but they can do some sort of mental gliding and soaring – and flapping – and Spenser enables and draws on such responses.
51.3.11
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