Spenser Studies 35 (2021)

Urvashi Chakravarty, “Fitt for Faire Habitacion”: Kinship and Race in A Vewe of the Present State of Irelande

This essay attends to the nexus of family, kinship, and blood in A vewe of the present state of Irelande through the intersection of critical race theory and queer theory. In A vewe, this essay argues, race colludes with genealogy and chronicity to achieve its structural effects, which work to construct both racial genealogies as well as racial futures. In particular, this essay looks at the concept of kincogish to propose that this Irish form of affinity both underscores and resists colonial modes of familial organization marked by consanguinity and lineal descent. The racialized strictures of straight, White temporality and genealogy, I suggest, also rely on the language and distinctions of epidermal race, as the English mandate for a “fairer waie” attempts to map both the land and the bodies of the Irish in the visual lexicon of light and dark and tries to discipline temporality and terrain by means of straight genealogy and White futurity.

Andrew Hadfield, In the Blood: Spenser, Race, and Identity

Notions of race based on blood and inheritance are widespread in the early modern period. Spenser uses the word “blood” on multiple occasions through the narrative of The Faerie Queene. Like other complex words in the poem—savage, justice, courtesy—it changes its meaning as the work progresses, forcing the reader to consider and evaluate what they think they know and to return to previous episodes and reread them in the light of later events and sequences of representations. Blood is the locus of identity, the essence of an individual and so possesses religious and racial significance. What is at stake in the existence and transmission of blood is complicated and problematic throughout Spenser’s works. Bloodlines may determine identity, or they may tell us very little about them. In this essay I explore Spenser’s understanding of blood, race, and identity through an examination of selected passages in A View of the Present State of Ireland and the stained hands of Ruddymane at the start of The Faerie Queene, Book II. Blood emerges as a significant factor in establishing identity, with inheritance through the blood determining legal as well as racial identities.

Thomas Herron, Mixed Up: Race, Degeneration, and Irish “Old English” Politics in Spenser’s Castle Joyous and Bower of Bliss

This essay builds on insights into Malecasta’s wanton character to examine her politicized meaning in the allegory of The Faerie Queene Books I–III, as a discourteous and inhospitable threat to the idealized “British” and chaste woman warrior represented by Britomart. Malecasta represents in her bad rule of Castle Joyous (III.i) social pollution with a proto-racial emphasis, that is, degeneration. An unnoticed cognate with Malecasta’s punning name is the Spanish malecasta, to be of “mixed race.” As such, Malecasta in her “bower” appears to allegorize on one level the corrupting influence of Spanish and Continental romances, including those with Irish subject matter, and, on a political level, the Continental-leaning, colonial Old English culture found in Spenser’s Ireland: old noble houses that had intermingled with the Irish, grown and decayed over centuries through excess wealth and power. Comparisons are made with Acrasia in the Bower of Bliss to demonstrate how Britomart in Castle Joyous must not only resist her own sexualized nature but must avoid being pulled down to the muddy level of Malecasta’s corrupted social sphere.

Ross Lerner, Allegorization and Racialization in The Faerie Queene

Ania Loomba has suggested that we attend to two techniques of racialized governance in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England: “the creation of internal hierarchies within a population” and the increasingly reified assumption of “correspondence between the ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ of human beings.” This essay claims that The Faerie Queene produces a surprising resemblance between racialization and allegory as a literary form. Testing this hypothesis primarily in Book V’s scenes of racialized punishment, it explores how allegory produces internal hierarchies and a correspondence between the outside and inside of beings in the poem. At the same time, it suggests Spenser’s immanent critique of allegory as technique and mode might also be viewed as the poem’s own analysis of the intimacy between racialization and colonial violence, repeatedly revealing the failure of the production of difference and the instability of racialized hierarchy.

Benedict S. Robinson, “Swarth” Phantastes: Race, Body and Soul in The Faerie Queene

This essay probes the strange relationship of allegory and race in The Faerie Queene. It takes its rise from the description of Phantastes in Book II as “swarth”: the faculty of imagination is racialized; race is thereby introduced at the very point at which an allegory of the body—the House of Alma—opens onto an allegory of the powers of the soul. Placing a racialized figure here invites some strange questions about the ontology of race, as the poem constructs it. In fact it invites us to wonder whether what racializing discourse projects or produces is primarily a “fact” about the body at all. This essay connects the question of race to histories of the ontology of body and soul. It uses the figure of Phantastes to ask what The Faerie Queene can tell us about racializing discourse in the early modern period, exploring in one small instance what it means to bring Spenser’s poem into ongoing conversations about race.

Tess Grogan, “Gather up the reliques of thy race”: Paynim Remains in Faery-land

Placing Sansfoy’s death and the disappearance of his body alongside The Faerie Queene’s other defeated paynims—the Souldan and Pollente, Pyrochles and Cymochles—reveals that Spenser’s poem breaks from epic tradition in its treatment of the enemy dead. The corpse desecration and immoderate mourning habitually practiced by Spenser’s foreign characters makes visible early modern English anxieties about the limits placed on grief and the rites owed to the departed. In Book II, classical ideals of universal burial are gradually supplanted by treatment determined by racial and religious difference. Guyon’s evolving response to the question of burial discloses the racial stakes of paynim death in Books I and V. In its ambivalent handling of foreign mourners, however, the poem remains suspended between an emerging racialized logic of death and a human right to decent burial held in common.

Anna Wainwright, “Tied Up in Chains of Adamant”: Recovering Race in Tasso’s Armida Before, and After, Acrasia

Spenser’s use of Italian sources in The Faerie Queene has been widely explored by scholars. But how does race work in those texts themselves? In this essay, I consider the Bower of Bliss and its literary antecedents—Spenser’s sources provide a rich opportunity to explore race and its interplay with gender and religion. My focus lies on the character of Acrasia’s foremother, the Muslim enchantress Armida, and the dramatic change to her fate between the two versions of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581) and the Gerusalemme conquistata (1593). I argue that a consideration of how Tasso violently excludes Armida from the second half of the Conquistata, which was published after Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, provides a new understanding of the particular racialization of Tasso’s enchantress. Across substantial national and religious boundaries, Spenser’s and Tasso’s choices demonstrate a common racial logic in play in 1590s Europe, one that allows neither Armida nor Acrasia to survive their poems.

Eric Song, Maybe She’s Born with It: Spenser’s Una, Milton’s Eve, and the Question of Golden Hair

This essay reopens the question of why Spenser’s Una and Milton’s Eve have golden hair. Una’s golden hair is allegorical; Eve’s golden hair is less so. Yet in both cases, the unstable function of hair color as a racial marker proves meaningful. Both Spenser and Milton actively work to subordinate the questions surrounding golden hair as a racial marker to claims of a universal truth that should render difference obsolete. By insisting on the relevance of race, this essay details how Spenser and Milton still uphold what we would now label a Eurocentric standard of beauty even while questioning attachment to golden hair as potentially idolatrous. In both Book I of The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, the problems of particularity in relation to universality are not so much resolved as they are deflected into narratives of rocky conjugal unions. It is important that Redcrosse and Milton’s Adam both have hair of unspecified color. This essay pays special attention to the precedents set by Italian epics, in which the allure of golden hair is a site of racial fantasies and anxieties.

Melissa E. Sanchez, “To Giue Faire Colour”: Sexuality, Courtesy, and Whiteness in The Faerie Queene

This essay explores the losses that Spenser studies has incurred in its neglect of the scholarship on early modern race that has compounded over the past thirty years. Much of this work has been produced by scholars of color, and particularly feminist scholars of color, who remain strikingly underrepresented in Spenser studies. If we treat this body of knowledge as central rather than peripheral to analysis of The Faerie Queene, we can expand our understanding of the multidimensional nature of Spenserian racial formations, which collaborate with White norms of gendered hierarchy and sexual innocence. Extensively, even obsessively, allegorizing female appetite and autonomy in racialized terms, Spenser’s Book of Courtesy allows us to appreciate the centrality of Whiteness to the seemingly race-neutral ideals of courtesy and civility, as well as the dependence of those ideals on the selective deployment of slander and violence.

Ayanna Thompson, Afterword: Me, The Faerie Queene, and Critical Race Theory

Why isn’t there already a rich body of premodern critical race studies of Spenser? The Faerie Queene, after all, is 430 years old, and premodern critical race studies is at least 50 years old. The epic poem has a rich and diverse cast of characters with both different religious and racial affiliations. This special edition marks a watershed moment in Spenser studies, but why has it taken until 2021 to achieve this? The answer, I think, stems from the way the racecraft of Spenser studies conceals the affiliation of its racism and inequality. The afterword explores these issues, and points toward future directions.

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