This essay is a somewhat expanded version of a conference paper that I presented at a panel called ‘Servitude and Slavery in Spenser’, sponsored by the International Spenser Society, at Renaissance Society of America’s virtual conference in 2021. I am grateful to Debapriya Sarkar and Susanne Wofford for organising the panel, to Dennis Britton for chairing it and to my fellow panellists, Urvashi Chakravarty and Ashley Sarpong.
In Book VI, canto x of The Faerie Queene, a group of brigands raid the poem’s pastoral idyll and capture Melibee, Coridon and Pastorella. At the beginning of the next canto, the brigands unsuccessfully attempt to sell their captives into slavery. This essay wonders why Spenser’s Faerie Queene enters into an apparently non-allegorical mode in order to describe a process that itself relies on the operations of allegory.[1] Since the essay originated as a conference paper intending to provoke further thought about the term “slaves” as it appears in Spenser’s poem, it neither exhausts possible avenues of investigation nor concludes those that it opens up, but I hope that it indicates a few productive ways forward.
With a few exceptions, notably Elizabeth Mazzola and Ashley Sarpong’s brilliant presentations at RSA alongside this paper, critics have tended to touch lightly on the depiction of slave-trading in Book VI, viewing it as a conventional aspect of the romance genre inherited from literary precursors, or an intensifier of the brigand’s “barbarism”.[2] But the figurative operations of slavery merit careful attention, especially in a poem so highly aware of its own literary mechanisms and their political and ethical stakes. Scholars in Black Studies, early modern critical race studies and classics have shown that the entangled relationship of slavery and race can only be understood if the figurative logic of slavery is studied alongside its material historical forms.[3] Urvashi Chakravarty demonstrated this approach on the same panel as the present paper by analysing the policing of whiteness and gender in Book V’s representation of Artegall temporarily enslaved to Radigund. Chakravarty’s forthcoming book, Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England, will be a vital resource for ongoing study of this topic.[4] I take a similar course in exploring the literary and historical contexts of the only representation of mercantile chattel slavery in Spenser’s epic poem.
This essay will focus on three stanzas that contain The Faerie Queene’s only four uses of the term “slaves” in the plural – with and without the prefix “bond”. The term also appears three times in the singular, in Books I, II and V, each time bearing more obvious political and allegorical meaning than it does in the plural.[5] Whereas the singular “slave” is invariably an intensifier used to describe the hero knight in an inappropriate situation, the plural form refers to a group of largely undifferentiated people who are being sold into slavery by the brigands and who, with the important exceptions of Pastorella and Coridon, do not survive the episode. This contrast between singular and plural sustains, in the context of Spenser’s poem, the larger division between political ideas about slavery that circulated in renaissance humanist discourse and the practice of chattel slavery that exists “out there” in a world of one-to-one correspondences. But as Mary Nyquist has shown us, this division is more apparent than real, and it disavows the role of political figuration in the historical practice of chattel slavery.[6]
Critics often discuss Malbecco’s transformation into Jealousy at the end of Book III as a moment in which the epic self-consciously dramatises the operations of allegory. Malbecco’s renaming formalises the allegorical transformation that the poem has spent multiple stanzas describing: he ‘forgot he was a man, and Gelosy is hight’ (III.x.60). As Susanne Wofford puts it in her study of this moment, ‘the presence of the figure requires the absence of the person’.[7] What if we give a similar kind of attention to the fact that the shepherds, including those previously named Meliboe and Coridon, are renamed as “slaves” in these stanzas? The frequent use of “slave” as an insult directed at people who are not enslaved in sixteenth-century literature attests to its figurative potential. Like “Una” or “Duessa”, the word “slave” bears ontological implications about the person to whom it is applied. In his archival study, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677, Imtiaz Habib records that, in 1547/8, the testament of an African diver called Jacques Francis was legally challenged on the basis that he was ‘a morisco born where they are not christenyd […] and slave […so] no Credite nor faithe ought to be geven to his Sayenges as in other Stranges Christian cuntryes hit ys to no suche slave geven’.[8] Naming Jacques a “morisco” and a “slave” is deployed here in an attempt to dismiss his voice in a court of law. By way of its relationship to classical philosophy alone, the word “slave” carried ethical, ontological and racial implications, imputing a subject’s rationality and virtue, and associating them with “barbarism”, itself a racialising classical notion as Ian Smith has shown us.[9] “Morisco” was a Hispano-Muslim religio-racial identity whose bearers were subjected to successive waves of expulsion.[10] Even as “slave” names a literal economic and legal category in the early modern European world, it works to overlay a person’s significance with the dehumanising information contained within that category, rendering any irrelevant attributes invisible.[11] The use of the word “slaves” in cantos x and xi, even if only temporarily, locks the captive shepherds into a matrix of moral, legal, and cultural meaning that threatens to erase the people beneath the figure.
The first reference to “slaves” comes after the brigands’ raid at the end of canto x, as they transport captives to their den of caves:
Hither those Brigants brought their present pray,
And kept them with continuall watch and ward,
Meaning so soone, as they convenient may,
For slaves to sell them, for no small reward,
To merchants, which them kept in bondage hard,
Or sold againe. […] (VI.x.43)
In the transition to canto xi an unspecified length of time passes, and it transpires that the brigand captain’s ‘barbarous heart’ has become ‘fired’ for Pastorella so that ‘her alone he for his part desired / Of all the other pray’ (xi.4). In order to guard herself from his intensifying sexual harassment, Pastorella fains a ‘sodaine sicknesse’,
During which space that she thus sicke did lie,
It chaunst a sort of merchants, which were wount
To skim those coastes, for bondmen there to buy,
And by such trafficke after gaines to hunt,
Arrived in this Isle though bare and blunt,
T’inquire for slaves; where being readie met
By some of these same theeves at the instant brunt,
Were brought unto their Captaine, who was set
By his faire patients side with sorrowfull regret. (xi.9)
To whom they shewed, how those marchants were
Arriv’d in place, their bondslaves for to buy,
And therefore prayd, that those same captives there
Mote to them for their most commodity
Be sold, and mongst them shared equally.
This their request the Captaine much appalled;
Yet could he not their just demand deny,
And willed straight the slaves should forth be called,
And sold for most advantage not to be forestalled. (xi.10)
The word “slaves” never appears in a stanza that does not also contain the word “merchants”. This relationship reenforces the abstract economic definition of a “slave” that, like an allegorical figure, exerts a particular kind of pressure on narrative. In their renaming as “slaves”, the shepherds’ narrative existence up to and including their capture and transportation by brigands becomes the suppressed genealogy of their metamorphosis into a metaphysical commodity, to borrow terms from Gordon Teskey.[12] Whilst the narrative concentrates its affective energy on Pastorella and her individual plight, the rest of the captives float into abstraction. Their loss of narrative immediacy is reenforced by the past tense of the ‘merchants which them kept in bondage hard / Or sold againe’ (x.43) and the habitual air of ‘a sort of merchants, which were wount / To skim those coastes, for bondmen there to buy’ (xi.9, my emphasis). The possibility that the people sold as “slaves” might be ‘solde againe’ introduces a potentially endless cycle of exchange that exceeds narrative time.
Malbecco becomes timeless (and deathless) when he metamorphises into Jealousy. In a different way, the shepherds become eternal figures when they become “slaves”, losing all social and narrative specificity when they are mixed with an unnamed group of others ‘whom they before in diverse spoyles had caught’ (xi.11). When the trade negotiation collapses and the enslaved captives are killed, the merchants melt away without explanation.[13] As the example of Malbecco indicates, allegory is not separate from, but reliant on narrative, which it then suppresses. Do the merchants enter the text solely to produce the narrative conditions in which the allegorical figure of “slaves” can come into being?
The merchants also raise the issue of “custom”, which was the basis of lex mercatoria or “law merchant”, a code of practice-based rules and principles that spontaneously evolved amongst merchants in medieval Europe, often in tension with local and royal law.[14] The brigands demand that their captain sell Pastorella along with the rest of the captives in stanzas bristling with the terms of law merchant: ‘trafficke’, ‘gaines’, ‘commodity’, the notion of an equal share, ‘just demand’, ‘advantage’ and ‘forestallment’.[15] Forestalment in particular –the mercantile crime of withholding goods from market – was an indictable offence in England. In 1592 the Privy Council denounced those who commited it as ‘wycked people in condicions more lyke to wolves or cormorants then to naturall men’.[16] Imtiaz Habib argues that Elizabethan involvements in slavery were ‘not defined by public law as much as they set the conditions for the expediency of the legal’.[17] The expediency of the merchant legal in particular is revealed by the deployment of its terminology – by the narrator, not the brigands – in this context. Brian Lockey has argued that in Book VI, Spenser is negotiating incompatible ideologies of continental natural law and English common law to justify the conquest of Ireland.[18] How does the custom-based system of Law Merchant and its relationship to slavery fit in?
Depending on how you look at it, custom – knowing how to behave in accordance with a long-established order – either serves as a foil to, or ironises, Book VI’s title virtue of courtesy, which depends on the ‘bands of civilitie’ (i.26) and ‘friendly offices that bynde’ (x.23). Are the chattel ‘slaves’ who are to be ‘kept in bondage hard’ introduced as the conceptual inversion of those who are ‘bound’ into civil society, or do they represent the literal basis of civil society on bound bodies? The term “bond” recurs in a double sense throughout Spenser’s epic, signifying loss of liberty on the one hand (‘free or bond’ (I.xii.28); ‘servile bond’ (II.viii.56; V.x.27), ‘vassal bond’ (IV.ix.18)) and pleasant social relations on the other ( ‘lovely bond’ (IV.ii.31); ‘friendships bond’ (IV.iii.Arg); ‘loyal bond’ (V.iv.3)).[19] In The Choice of Achilles, Susanne Wofford notes that figures in the Faerie Queene are bound by personifications of vice (such as Error) and by virtues (such as courtesy or friendship), but observes that both forms of binding ‘signal moments of allegorical compulsion’.[20] Yet the binding of the shepherds strikes us differently. Clare Regan Kinney draws the contrast thus: ‘In the earlier books of The Faerie Queene characters were often “caytive thralls”, symbolically enthralled to one kind of evil or another […], but here there is a new literalness to the plight of the rustics’.[21]
Yet the literal binding that we see in the case of Book VI’s “slaves” cannot be so easily distinguished from moments of ‘allegorical compulsion’. Notions of courtesy and civility intersect with a notion of servility that has been used to absorb and erase racialised members of society, as Urvashi Chakravarty has argued.[22] Ideologically, as David Evett has shown, to participate in Elizabethan civil society on any level meant to be in service.[23] Spenser exemplifies this thinking in A View when Irenius blames Old English degeneration on ‘liberty and ill examples’.[24] However, ideological bondage became ever more literal and embodied the further you went down the scale of ‘degree’. Patricia Akhimie’s recent book, Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference, has analysed the Elizabethan conduct system as predicated on a ‘spectrum of mutability to immutability’ that maintained a labouring class in fixed and unfree condition, and was instrumental in the production of racial difference.[25] In my dissertation I explore how Platonic and Aristotelian visions of the polis reserved an ontologically fixed conceptual space – the space of the “slave” – for the embodied labour that was required to enable a society of free citizens to devote themselves to the life of the mind.[26] A figurative form of bondage at one end of the social spectrum becomes a literal form of bondage at the other, but the two are equally implicated in the overall conceptual structure of courtesy. It is therefore misleading to excise the most literal form of bondage from the allegorical scheme of Spenser’s Book VI.
This is all the more the case because in practice chattel slavery manipulates an allegorical mechanism to overwrite personhood with thingness. As Orlando Patterson has argued, in legal practice from Ancient Greece onwards, enslaved people were invariably treated as both persons and things.[27] The notion of the slave as res (thing) rather than a person – albeit human – was an aspect of the Roman ‘legal fiction of dominium or absolute ownership’. Yet, as Patterson also acknowledges, that fiction was and remains enormously influential over the way in which slavery was viewed.[28] A fusion of mercantilism and eroticism that plays on this fiction is encapsulated in the homophony of ‘praize’ and price that accompanies negotiations over Pastorella in the slave-market.
Pastorella’s beauty is praised in the standard similes of Elizabethan love lyric – she is like a ‘diamond of rich regard’ – but the irony is that she is even more like a diamond in that she is being sold to merchants for profit. The border between figurative and literal representation collapses. The beauty which had earlier caused the shepherds to ‘esteeme’ Pastorella in notably political terms as ‘their soveraine goddesse’ (ix.9), is converted into an economic estimate when the brigands strive ‘t’augment her price, through praise of comlinesse’ (xi.11). Her price then merges with the fluctuating prices of the whole stock in the merchants’ and brigands’ calculations. The merchants refuse to buy the other captives ‘however prised with measure, / Withouten her’ (xi.14). In response, the brigands demand the captaine that Pastorella ‘should with the rest be sold […] To make the prises of the rest more deare’ (xi.15). Trade relations – the brigand captain’s refusal to sell Pastorella and the merchants’ refusal to buy anyone without her – transform into the price relations of the “slaves”, as commodities, to each other. When the brigands argue that Pastorella will make the others more expensive they divide her value back across the rest of the enslaved shepherds in a kind of economic blazon that mirrors the erotic dismemberment of Serena by the salvage nation. This extends Book VI’s litany of women at the centre of circles of appraisal and misappraisal, revealing a more literal kind of schism between the form of value and the object in which it congeals.
*
What difference does, or should, any of this make to the way we read the brigand episode and its place in Book VI of The Faerie Queene? The brigands tend to be read in two modes: as historical allegories, and as a literary motif inherited from classical romance.[29]
In the historical mode, the brigands have been interpreted as evoking the threat of Gaelic Irish and Old English rebels, Scottish borderers, Spanish Catholics and burglars.[30] Their name may derive from a Celtic goddess Brigantia, or roman client kingdom the Brigantes, referenced in Ptolemy.[31] Their network of caves, as Andrew Hadfield and Thomas Herron have argued, evoke Irish ‘souterrains’ or ‘crannógs’.[32] Their involvement in slavery evokes English denouncements of the tyrannical Irish for keeping their subjects in conditions of ‘thralldom’.[33] Additionally, when the scene of their attempted trade is thrown into relief as a slave-market rather than any other kind of commercial market, the brigands’ border-crossing and ineptitude at husbandry links them to the increasingly global network of merchants who were actively trading people as commodities throughout the sixteenth century.[34] The brigands’ ‘hellish dens’ can be linked to the huge prisons or “bagnios” in which enslaved people were held awaiting sale or deployment on galleys in European, Ottoman and North African port-cities.[35] Their raid on a pastoral setting evokes the raids of corsairs along the southern Mediterranean coast, in which hundreds of people were captured and enslaved from rural towns.[36] It also evokes the raids of John Hawkins and his crew on the coast of West Africa, and their attempts to trade enslaved Africans in the Iberian Atlantic colonies, all of which is recounted in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1589).[37] If Spenser is using the brigands to demonise the Irish, the Spanish, and Muslims, is he also admitting the link between them and the merchant-gentry of England, a number of whom were involved or invested in African enslavement in the Iberian peninsula and Canary Islands, as Gustav Ungerer has argued, from as early as the 1480s? Whilst English trans-Atlantic slavery did not develop into a large-scale enterprise until the seventeenth century, the sporadic English incursions during the sixteenth century indicate a growing awareness of African enslavement in connection to the possibility of colonies in the “New World”.
Spenser was personally acquainted with at least one of the men who took a keen interest in this connection. Sir William Winter was admiral of the English fleet that bombarded Smerwick in the notorious massacre of 1580, at which Spenser was present.[38] This fact was recounted to the Queen in a letter dictated by Lord Grey and taken down in Spenser’s secretarial hand. At one point it notes approvingly, ‘Sir William Winter himself made that shot’.[39] Winter also invested in a number of voyages to Guinea and the Caribbean including Hawkins’ expedition in 1564-5, and sent his own ship (apparently unsuccessfully) to join the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1570. In 1587 the parish records of St Botolph Aldgate record the death of ‘Domingo being a ginny negar and being servant to the right worshipfull Sir William Wynter knight dwellingye in the abbye place beinge the manor house of East Smithfield’.[40] As Habib notes, at the time of his death Domingo was a servant, and he appears to have been buried with a measure of respect.[41] But given Winter’s mercantile involvements and Domingo’s stated origins in Guinea, it is most likely that he had entered England via the Iberian-Atlantic slave-trade.[42]
It is also true that many contemporary accounts of enslavement that circulated in early modern England would have involved Europeans, perhaps with complexions as ‘fair’ as Pastorella’s. English merchants involved in the Muscovy Company from 1555 witnessed slavery on a large scale in Russia, where the enslaved population was mostly Slavic and Orthodox Christian.[43] Meanwhile, numerous captivity narratives in circulation recounted the enslavement of European Christians in the Mediterranean and Ottoman empire. This history has been turned to various purposes in a contemporary context, as Nabil Matar has shown. The figure of North African “barbary corsairs” has been fed into an Islamophobic mythology of blanket, trans-historical Muslim hostility towards Christians. The figure of enslaved “white” Christians – which has been dramatically overestimated – has been used to disavow the relationship between slavery and race during the era of the beginnings of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, in favour of a supposedly pre-racial era in the history of slavery.[44]
There are important differences between the forms of enslavement that were prevalent in the early modern Mediterranean and the incipient trans-Atlantic trade. Enslavement in the Mediterranean context, although frequently brutal and deadly, could also be a temporary condition remediable by ransom or manumission. As Nabil Matar has shown, many Christians who were captured by Muslims converted to Islam and settled amongst their former captors.[45] By contrast, the legal codes and fictions that worked to convert Black Africans into “Negros” in the colonial order affixed them to the status of “slaves” as a permanent, ontological condition.[46] Early modern proponents of New World slavery looked back to ancient Greek and Roman examples to provide this ontological conception of slavery.[47] Moreover, it is insufficient to analyse early modern European slavery as non-racial because it was not exclusively organised by skin colour. As Cedric Robinson and many others have argued, this approach misunderstands race as emerging from, rather than producing and organising specific forms of difference, reenforcing the tautology that ‘racial distinctions are the basis of racial sensibilities’.[48] Robinson’s Black Marxism argues that intra-European racialism (for example, the racial denigration of the central European peoples whose medieval Roman name – “sclavus” – originated the term “slave”) was a foundational element in the development of Western civilization and capitalism, forming one basis for the extra-European racism that produced the category of the “negro” and the “native” from the sixteenth century onwards.[49]
Bearing in mind Stuart Hall’s argument that ‘race works like a language’, we might say that slavery has long been one of the difference-organising terms in its signifying field.[50] The attempted trade depicted in Spenser’s poem sits at the historical intersection between different racial grammars, which makes it all the more important to analyse. Building on Kim F. Hall’s reading of the gendered Elizabethan discourse of fairness and its connections to mercantilism, and Urvashi Chakravarty’s insight into the connection between whiteness, Englishness and ‘unblotted recuperability’ from slavery in Book V of The Faerie Queene, how can we connect Pastorella’s conspicuous imagery of fairness and light ‘that all the rest like lesser lamps did dim’ (ix.9) – which has its literary precursor in Chariclea’s miraculously white skin in Heliodorus’ Aethiopica – to her exceptional status throughout the episode, her noble blood, and the fact that the attempted trade in “slaves” breaks down around her?[51]
The second interpretative mode referred to above is to read the brigand episode in relation to the captivity motif passed down from Longus, Heliodorus, Ariosto, Tasso and other romance authors.[52] This approach generally intersects with readings that foreground the dissolution of allegory in Book VI.[53] I have two suggestions to make. First, I contend that the historical contexts proposed above are relevant to any analysis of the literary connection between Book VI and romance. Both Benedict Robinson and Miriam Jacobson discuss early modern English poetry, and especially its appropriations of the romance genre, as efforts to mediate between antiquity and a contemporary world transformed by mercantilism.[54] Informed by this approach, we can investigate Spenser’s appropriation of the romance captivity trope as an effort to situate the very real resurgence of slavery that accompanied mercantile expansion, simultaneously evoking a classical past and presaging capitalist colonial futures. Ashley Sarpong’s insightful approach to this episode in terms of the georgic tradition and capitalist ideology adds another dimension to any such investigation, introducing another classical influence behind Spenser’s depiction of slavery.[55] On this point, it is worth noting that none of Spenser’s romance sources group the captive female protagonist with a number of anonymised “slaves”.[56] It is also significant that Tatius’ Leucippe, Heliodorus’ Chariclea, Ariosto’s Isabel, and Tasso’s Erminia are all captured when they are already on the move through the narrative mechanisms of romance, whereas Pastorella and her companions are captured from their pastoral ‘dwelling’ (x.39).[57] Finally, all of Spenser’s romance sources drew on the material realities of slavery that were contemporary to them. There is every reason to think that Spenser’s appropriation does the same.
My second suggestion is that the slavery in this episode complicates any simple opposition of allegory to romance. Gordon Teskey has theorised the relationship between allegory and violence, transforming how we read Spenser’s poem.[58] In the context of Book VI’s ostensible retreat into non-allegorical romance narrative, the introduction of “slaves” opens a trapdoor: we fall back through it into a form of allegory, but one that is no longer distinguished from material reality. In my dissertation, I trace the conceptual links between allegory and slavery that emerge in Plato’s Republic. Political scientist Andrés Fabián Henao Castro’s recent re-interpretation of Plato’s allegory of the cave argues that it dramatises Ancient Greek democracy’s dependence on enslaved labour in mines. Philosophy is allegorised as a captive’s escape from bondage, but it becomes clear that the philosopher-king depends upon bodies that remain bound both figuratively and literally: ‘the allegory facilitates a short circuit to the reality of slavery’.[59] Kenneth Borris has argued for the centrality of Plato’s cave to our understanding of Spenser’s poetic mission throughout the Faerie Queene, and especially in Book VI. In Plato’s cave as in the cave of Spenser’s brigands, the boundary between figurative fiction and material reality collapses in the representation of the enslaved person.[60]
Moreover, the practice of chattel slavery, especially as it was developing in the Atlantic colonial context, was itself allegorical in that it suppressed the identity of the enslaved human beneath the metaphysical idea of the “slave” and their value in exchange or labour. As Colin Dayan puts it in her study of slavery and the ‘sorcery of the law’: ‘Slavery in the colonies rendered material the conceptual, giving embodiment to what had been an abstraction’.[61] This is allegory according to CS Lewis’s distinction of allegory from symbolism: the process of giving body to an abstraction rather than reaching abstraction through a body.[62] The invisible problem has been that, because the attempted slave-trade appears in a part of Spenser’s epic that critics generally view as having been taken over by romance narrative, the allegorical operation of chattel slavery itself, with mercantilism as its narrative condition of possibility, passes under the radar. The enslavement described at the beginning of canto xi becomes one in a series of things that “just happen”, with that contingency itself representing romance overcoming allegorical epic in its final stages. The attempt to sell people into slavery in this episode is therefore taken as one part of a larger dynamic in which farcical realness intrudes into allegorical poetry. A tendency to stop there has allowed the distinctive operation of chattel slavery itself to go unnoticed and undertheorised.
[1] I want to thank the anonymous readers at Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies for their helpful advice on an earlier, different version of this work.
[2] Elizabeth Mazzola, ‘Working Postulates and Humanist Promises: Slavery and Mythology in Spenser’s Faerie Queene’, in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 82: 3.4 (Fall/Winter 1999), 465-80. Ashley Sarpong analysed this episode in relation to nascent trans-Atlantic slavery and the relationship between georgic poetry and colonial and capitalist ideology in ‘Georgic Dreams, Savage Nightmares: Calidore, Brigands, and Legacies of Slavery, Book VI of Faerie Queene’, RSA Virtual, April 15, 2021. Further work on slavery in Spenser includes Maureen Quilligan, ‘On the Renaissance Epic: Spenser and Slavery’. South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 100: 1 (2001), 15–39; Jeffrey B. Griswold, ‘Human Vulnerability and Natural Slavery in The Faerie Queene’, Exemplaria, forthcoming. For an overview of scholarship on Spenser and race, see Dennis Austin Britton and Kimberly Anne Coles, ‘Spenser and Race: An Introduction’ in Spenser Studies 35 (2021), 1-19. This essay is particularly influenced by articles in that volume by Ross Lerner, Benedict S. Robinson, and Melissa Sanchez, each of which explore race in connection to allegory and/or courtesy. See also Jean Feerick, ‘Spenser, Race and Ire-land’ in English Literary Renaissance, 32: 1 (2002), 85-117; Dennis Austin Britton, Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); Kimberly Anne Coles, Bad Humour: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England, (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming).
[3] I am thinking primarily of Sylvia Wynter, Caribbean intellectual, Black feminist, novelist and playwright, who has genealogised the Western concept of the human, Man, to reveal the relationship in figurative logic between medieval Christian theology, renaissance humanist revivals of Aristotelian political theory, European colonial slavery, Darwinian scientific racism and contemporary anti-Black violence. I explore this further in my article ‘Spenser with Sylvia Wynter’. See Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument’ in CR: The Centennial Review, 3: 3 (2003) 257-337. Cf. Miles P. Grier, ‘Inkface: The Slave Stigma in England’s Early Imperial Imagination’ in Scripturalising the Human: The Written as the Political, edited by Vincent L. Wimbush, (New York: Routledge, 2015) 193–220; Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study with a New Preface, (Harvard University Press, 1982; repr. 2018); and ‘Freedom, slavery, and the Modern Construction of Rights’ in The Cultural Values of Europe, ed. Hans Joas and Klaus Wiegandt, trans. Alex Skinner, (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2008); Page DuBois, Slaves and Other Objects (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 1-31.
[4] Urvashi Chakravarty, ‘“So Hard It Is To Be A Woman’s Slave”: Race, Slavery and Gender in Spenser’, RSA Virtual, April 15, 2021. Fictions of Consent is forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press in March 2022.
[5] “Slave” as a noun in the singular appears first in Book I, when the Redcrosse knight is captured by Orgoglio (I.vii.14); second in Book II, when Guyon responds to Mammon that he would rather ‘be Lord of those, that riches have, / Then them to have my selfe, and be their servile sclave’ (II.vii.33); third, after Artegall surrenders himself to Radegund who forces him to spin and card wool in women’s weeds: ‘A sordid office for a mind so brave. / So hard it is to be a womans slave’ (V.iv.23). I used Charles Grosvenor Osgood, A Concordance to the Poems of Edmund Spenser, (Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1915).
[6] Mary Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 2013)
[7] Susanne Wofford, The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic (Stanford University Press, 1992), 299.
[8] Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 52.
[9] Ian Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). On links between Plato and Aristotle’s conception of “slavery” see Peter Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (Cambridge University Press, 1996); on the relationship to barbarism, Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule, 26-37.
[10] For a historical introduction to moriscos in Spain, see Vincent Barletta, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Francisco Núñez Muley, A Memorandum for the President of the Royal Audencia and Chancery Court of the City and Kingdom of Granada, edited and translated by Vincent Barletta (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013).
[11] This drives the current debate amongst historians over how to use the term “slave”. See Lucy Ferriss, ‘The Language of Enslavement’, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 12 2017; Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, revised edition, (New York, London: WW Norton and Co., 1985 repr. 1999), 8.
[12] See Gordon Teskey, “Mutability, Genealogy, and the Authority of Forms” in Representations 41 (1993) 104-122. A version of this article appears in Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), 168-189. I engage with Teskey’s interpretation at much greater length in ‘Wanting Courtesy: Neoplatonism, Slavery Logic and the Whiteness of the Fourth Grace’, forthcoming in English Literary Renaissance, in which I argue my claim that a “slave” is a metaphysical concept in Platonic and Aristotelian thought.
[13] The slaughter of the captives could be one of the most shocking moments in The Faerie Queene – hundreds of innocent people are killed for a senseless reason – but their loss of narrative power seems absolute by this point, and it almost passes us by.
[14] See Bruce L. Benson, ‘Lex Mercatoria’, in Encyclopedia of Law and Economics, eds. A Marciano and G. Ramallo (New York: Springer, 2016)
[15] Andrew Zurcher, Spenser’s Legal Language: Law and Poetry in Early Modern England, (Boydell and Brewer, 2007), 248; 241; 257.
[16] Quoted in Gilbert Geis, ‘ancient mercantile crime’. Encyclopedia of White-Collar & Corporate Crime, edited by Lawrence M. Salinger (Sage Publications, 2004).
[17] Black Lives, 70.
[18] Brian Lockey, ‘Spenser’s Legalization of the Irish Conquest in A View and Faerie Queene VI’, English Literary Renaissance, 31:3 (2001), 365-91.
[19] Osgood, A Concordance to the Poems of Edmund Spenser. In my dissertation I build on Amanda Bailey’s work to explore the implicit link between legal debt bonds and Spenser’s description of rudeness as people ‘not yielding what they owe’ (VI.ii.1). Amanda Bailey, Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2013).
[20] Choice of Achilles, 303.
[21] Clare Regan Kinney, Strategies of Poetic Narrative: Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 113.
[22] Urvashi Chakravarty, ‘The Problem of Civility: A Genealogy’, The Rambling 3 (29 January, 2019).
[23] David Evett, Discourses of Service in Shakespeare’s England, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). This idea was echoed in George Fitzhugh’s 1854 polemic in defence of southern slavery: ‘The love of personal liberty and freedom from all restraint, are distinguishing traits of wild men and wild beasts. […] As civilization advances, liberty recedes: and it is fortunate for man that he loses his love of liberty just as fast as he becomes more moral and intellectual.’ George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society. (Richmond, VA: A. Morris, 1854), 30. Digitised by UNC Chapel Hill, DOI: docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/fitzhughsoc/fitzhugh.html.
[24] Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland, ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley, (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997), 67.
[25] Akhimie, Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2018) 5. Cf. Margo Hendricks, ‘Civility, Barbarism, and The Widow Ranter’, in Women, “Race”, and Writing in the Early Modern Period (London: Routledge, 1994), 225-243.
[26] I elaborate this claim in my forthcoming article, ‘Wanting Courtesy’.
[27] Slavery and Social Death, 21-22.
[28] Slavery and Social Death, 31-32; quote on 31. In England, the Vagrancy Act of 1547 briefly made it legal to enslave vagrants. The English master could treat his enslaved vagrant as he would ‘any other movable goodes or Catelles’. C.S.L. Davies, ‘Slavery and Protector Somerset: The Vagrancy Act of 1547’, The Economic History Review, 19:3 (1966), 533-49; quoted on 534. Yet the fact that the vagrant could only be released from slavery if they inherited property reflects Patterson’s point that ‘the slave was a slave not because he was the object of property, but because he could not be the subject of property’ (Slavery and Social Death, 28). On connections to American slavery, see Bradley J. Nicholson, ‘Legal Borrowing and the Origins of Slave Law in the British Colonies’, The American Journal of Legal History, 38: 1 (1994): 38-54.
[29] In both cases, they are paralleled with the ‘salvage nation’ who attempt to sacrifice Serena in canto 8. Cf. James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of the Faerie Queene (Philadelphia: Princeton University Press, 1977) 665; Heather Dubrow, ‘“A doubtfull sense of things”: Thievery in The Faerie Queene 6.10 and 6.11’, in Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age, edited and introduced by Patrick Cheney and Lauren Silberman (University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 204-16; 205; Regan Kinney, 113.
[30] See Julia Reinhard Lupton, ‘Home-Making in Ireland: Virgil’s Eclogue I and Book VI of The Faerie Queene’, Spenser Studies 7 (1987): 119-45; 132; Andrew Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience: “Wilde Fruite” and “Salvage Soyl” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 184; Andrew Zurcher, Spenser’s Legal Language, 177-79; Paul Suttie, Self-Interpretation in the Faerie Queene (Woodbridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2006), 203.
[31] I owe these references to James Nohrnberg and Thomas Herron in correspondence on the Sidney-Spenser listserv, September 30th 2018. Cf. Dubrow, 205.
[32] See Thomas Herron, ‘Irish Den of Thieves: Souterrains (and a Crannóg?) in Books V and VI of Spenser’s Faerie Queene’, Spenser Studies 14, (2000), 303-17, and Andrew Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience, 184.
[33] Michael Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 49-50.
[34] Scholarship on the different forms and geographies of slavery in this period is too extensive to cite in full. For starting points on English involvements see Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen, 41-79; Imtiaz Habib, 63-119; Gustav Ungerer, The Mediterranean Apprenticeship of British Slavery (Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2008); Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), esp. 43-82; Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (London, New York: Verso, 1997). For literary analysis see Kim F. Hall’s discussion of mercantilism in Things of Darkness, Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Cornell University Press, 1995) and Sujata Iyengar on the Hawkins narratives in Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 200-19.
[35] On the “bagnios” (the first “slave” prison was a converted bathhouse in Constantinople), see Mark Rosen, ‘Pietro Tacca’s Quattro Mori and the Conditions of Slavery in Early Seicento Tuscany’, Art Bulletin, 97: 1 (2015): 34–57; 40; on the slave-prison in Valletta, see David Borg-Muscat, ‘Prison Life in Malta in the 18th Century: Valletta’s Gran Prigione’, Storja (2001): 42-51; John, L. Vogt, ‘The Lisbon Slave House and African Trade, 1486-1521’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol.117 (1973): 1-16; on Algiers, see Miguel de Cervantes, “The Bagnios of Algiers” and “The Great Sultana”: Two Plays of Captivity, translated and edited by Barbara Fuchs and Aaron J. Ilika (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
[36] Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Final Battle for the Mediterranean, 1521-1580 (London: Faber and Faber, 2008). Many of the pirates in the Mediterranean were English, cf. Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen, 57-59.
[37] Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Trafiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation. Vol. 10, (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1904), 17-20. I am grateful to Jyotsna G. Singh for first alerting me to the Hawkins narratives.
[38] David Loades, ‘Winter, Sir William (c. 1525–1589), naval administrator’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2009). Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),161-169. In my dissertation, I provide a more extensive breakdown of Spenser’s proximity to the English milieu involved in slave-trades.
[39] ‘Grey to the Queen, 12th November 1580, NA (PRO) SP 63/78/29’, Spenser Letters, Hap Hazard: A Manuscript Resource for Spenser Studies, transcribed by Christopher Burlinson and Andrew Zurcher, DOI: https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/haphazard/letters/lettersindex.html
[40] Rosalyn Knutson, ‘A Caliban in St Mildred Poultry’, in Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions: the selected proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Tokyo, 1991, edited by Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle, Stanley W. Wells (Wilmington: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 110-26; 144. Cf. Ungerer, 80-81; Habib, 74; 303.
[41] Habib, 74.
[42] Cf. Knutson, 115.
[43] Richard Hellie, ‘Muscovite Slavery in Comparative Perspective’, Russian History, 6:2 (1979), 133-209. As Michael Guasco points out, in the much-quoted Elizabethan star chamber case that declared England ‘too pure an Air for Slaves to breathe in’, the enslaved person in question was Russian. Slaves and Englishmen, 45.
[44] Nabil Matar, British Captives from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1563-1760, (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 1-16, esp. 10. At the most extreme end of the tendency to view intra-European exploitation as the absence of race, mass indentured Irish labour in the Caribbean colonies has been used to deny the racial logic and legacy of trans-Atlantic slavery in America. See Liam Hogan, Laura McAtackney, and Matthew C. Reilly, ‘The Irish in the Anglo-Caribbean: Servants or Slaves?’, History Ireland, 24: 2 (2016), 18-22.
[45] Nabil Matar, ‘Two Arabic Accounts of Captivity in Malta’, in Piracy and Captivity in the Mediterranean: 1550-1810 (London: Routledge, 2018); 258-276; 261, and Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen,72-82. On Islamic slavery, see Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) 1-15.
[46] Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of a Black Radical Tradition, (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 81-82.
[47] Page DuBois has documented the way in which foundational classicists of the antebellum South fetishised ancient Greece in ‘overt or covert celebration of slave-holding in the guise of appreciation for heroic, exemplary ancestors’, putting timely pressure on the scholarly instinct to read early modern references to slavery as classical rather than related to race. Slaves and Other Objects, 10.
[48] Robinson, Black Marxism, 76. Cf. Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race.
[49] Robinson, Black Marxism, 71-100.
[50] Stuart Hall, ‘Race, the Floating Signifier: What More Is There to Say about “Race”?’ in Selected Writings on Race and Difference (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2021) 359-374, quote on 362.
[51] Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness; Urvashi Chakravarty, ‘So Hard it Is to be a Woman’s Slave’, quotation from my own notes on the presentation.
[52] Nohrnberg, 655-56.
[53] See Nohrnberg, 656 and 665-66; Isabel MacCaffrey, Spenser’s Allegory: The Anatomy of Imagination (Philadelphia: Princeton University Press, 1976), 403-422; C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936)353; Harry J. Berger, ‘A Secret Discipline: The Faerie Queene, Book VI’, in Form and Convention in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser: Selected Papers from the English Institute, edited by William Nelson (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1961), 35-76; 41, 74-75; Paul Alpers, ‘Spenser’s Late Pastorals’, ELH 56: 4 (1989): 797-817; Richard Neuse, ‘Book VI as Conclusion to The Faerie Queene’, ELH 35: 3 (1968): 329-53; Humphrey Tonkin, Spenser’s Courteous Pastoral: Book Six of the Faerie Queene (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 318; Regan Kinney, 71-73.
[54] Benedict S. Robinson, Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Miriam Jacobson, Barbarous Antiguity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), esp. 8-12.
[55] Sarpong, ‘Georgic Dreams, Savage Nightmares’.
[56] The closest parallel, as James Nohrnberg points out, is the tale of Leucippe’s capture and sale by pirates from Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon. As in Spenser, the pirate captain is killed because he wants Leucippe for himself, whereas they want to sell her. Unlike in Spenser, she is successfully sold, and there is no captive community of “slaves” being sold alongside her. A second source is the conflict of the pirates Trachinos and Peloros over Charikleia in Heliodorus’ Aethiopica. The fight descends into a mutual massacre akin to that of Spenser’s brigands. In this case however, the conflict is not between those who wish to sell and those who wish to love the female captive, but between rival lovers. ‘Leucippe and Clitophon’, VIII.16, translated by John J. Winkler, and Heliodorus, An Ethiopian Story, V.24-33, translated by J.R. Morgan, in Collected Ancient Greek Novels, edited by B.P. Reardon (University of California Press, 1989, repr. 2008), 281-282, 464-471. Cf. Nohrnberg, Analogy, 665
[57] Dubrow stresses the connotations of ‘home’ in this word, 206.
[58] Teskey, Allegory and Violence.
[59] Andrés Fabián Henao Castro, ‘Slavery in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, and the Militant Intellectual from the Global South’, Theatre Survey, 58: 1 (2017), 86-107.
[60] Kenneth Borris, Visionary Spenser and the Poetics of Early Modern Platonism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), esp. 156-184.
[61] Colin Dayan, The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (Philadelphia: Princeton University Press, 2011), 50; quoted in Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014), 50.
[62] C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, 44-5.
51.3.5
Comments
Comment deleted 2 years, 2 months ago
The book "Slavery" is a classic work of the American writer Henry David Thoreau. It tells about the life of slaves in the southern states of America in the first half of the 19th century and the issues of slavery in general. Allegory and romance in Book VI of The Fairy Queens bring a special atmosphere to the novel, allowing the reader to see the world of slavery through the prism of mythology and fabulousness. This is personally how I see it. Also read cause and effect recently, used https://phdessay.com/essay-type/cause-and-effect/ for this. I can say that I really liked it. This suits me more. Also, I would recommend reading other works by Henry David Thoreau, such as "Walden, or Life in the Woods" and "Civil Disobedience", if you have not already read them. These books may interest you for their philosophical and social topics.
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