Fame and Fortune: A Mirror for Magistrates, 1599-1946

Magdalen College, Oxford University, September 14-25, 2012

Bart van Es, “They Do It With Mirrors’: Spenser’s Political Vanishing Act’

This paper begins by examining Spenser’s politics in the context of the Elizabethan Mirror for Magistrates. Through the influence of Baldwin’s 1559 original and its numerous successors,the notion that history could act as a ‘mirror’ through which to examine present times became increasingly important in the reading of historical poetry and prose.  Spenser understood this dynamic and used it to great effect. His poetry was written with a ‘mirror-literate’ audience in mind.  Yet the concept of a text that functions politically as a ‘mirror’ for its readership presents significant problems. Can the politics of a text survive the passing of the moment of its first reception?  To what extent can we isolate that interpretative context?  How far is any account of Spenser’s politics itself a ‘mirror’ of the age in which it was produced? The paper invites discussion of these inevitable distortions.  Ultimately it argues for a flexible historicism that takes account of both historical context and reception history in its assessment of political intention. 

The 2012 South-Central Renaissance Conference

Panel: Spenser: Female Sexuality & Human Agency in The Faerie Queene

Chair: Thomas Herron, East Carolina University

Kristen Gipson, University of Louisiana at Lafayette,
“Lost in the Gaze: Paralyzing Female Power in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.”

The female characters of Edmund Spenser often find their power in the gaze—the ability to ensnare and paralyze men either through their beauty or their monstrosity.  This Medusa-like power to create stasis through the visual entrapment of the gaze creates problems for positive female characters like Una and Britomart, as well as negative characters like Acrasia and Duessa. Medusa’s paralyzing gaze in The Faerie Queene demonstrates the dangerous effects of sight to directly cause stasis.

Brenna Heffner, University of Louisiana at Lafayette,
“‘That substance is Eterne’: Female Sexuality in Book III of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.” 

In Book III of The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser specifically considers the issue of female sexuality and the balance between chastity and love.  By refashioning tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in cantos i, vi, x, and xi, Spenser creates a guide for aristocratic women on how to properly express sexuality within the social and religious confines of sixteenth-century Protestant England, while simultaneously critiquing Queen Elizabeth and her views of chastity and celibacy, especially her lack of an heir.  Through the characters in Book III of The Faerie Queene, Spenser champions physical love for women in a spiritual context that allows for mutual love and not mere procreation.

Jesisca Tooker, Indiana University-Bloomington,
“Oscillations of Human Agency and Divine Grace in Book VI, Canto x of The Faerie Queene.”

This paper examines Calidore's vision of the Graces on Mount Acidale in canto x, Book VI of Spenser's The Faerie Queene. It answers three central questions: What is the relationship of the natural world to processes of human agency and divine will? What do we make of the "surprise factor" in this canto (ex. the insertion of the poet and the nameless shepherdess into the center of the vision)? How is the vision related to its troubling aftermath in the remainder of the canto?

The 2012 Sixteenth Century Society Conference

Many thanks to Jonathan Sircy, Karen Nelson, and Katharine Cleland for providing abstracts of the following conference presentations. 

Panel: Biblical Texts and English Renaissance Literature

Organizer: Scott C. Lucas, The Citadel

Chair: Micheline White, Carleton University

Karen Clausen-Brown, University of Notre Dame, “‘By their change their being doe dilate’: Historicist Bible Reading in Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos.”

This paper argues that Spenser engages Reformation debates about Sabbath law.  Commentators read the Sabbath law as either natural (i.e. permanent) or ceremonial (i.e. culturally specific).  Spenser associates his poem with the Sabbath and sees in poetry a kind of active rest that will eventually grant a biblical or ideal permanence. 

-JS

Panel: Nationhood and National Identity in Early Modern England

Organizer: Scott C. Lucas, The Citadel

Chair: Cathy Shrank, University of Sheffield

Consuelo Concepcion, University of Glasgow, "The Ruines of Service: Colonial Authority, Nationhood, and the Meaning of Service in Edmund Spenser's The Ruines of Time and Sir Henry Sidney's Memoir."

This paper focuses upon the trajectory of Sidney's narrative of his Irish experiences, with special consideration for the events his memoir elided.  Sidney fashions himself as a royal servant and the Irish as rebellious upstarts, but his actions as a leader remain barbarous and he himself degenerates into a specifically English barbarity unresponsive to Irish cultural codes. Similarly, Spenser, in The Ruines of Time, describes actions that reflect the cost of enforcing imagined English ideals regarding the Irish nation.

-KN

Panel: The Poetry of Complaint in Early Modern Britain

Organizer and Chair: Scott C. Lucas, The Citadel

Jeffrey Hehmeyer, University of California, Santa Barbara, "Verlame: Imperium, Complaint, and Spenser's Epic Project."

This paper asserts that in The Ruines of Time Spenser realigns his poetic project in response to what is termed the "Second Empire of Elizabeth." Because Spenser also echoes William Camden's invocation in Brittania of England as an archeological site, The Ruines of Time ultimately considers the consequences of empire-building and gives voice to its victims, thereby nuancing Spenser's overall representation of empire. 

-KN

Panel: Renaissance Eroticism II

Organizer: Ernest P. Rufleth, Louisiana Tech University


Chair: Erin L. Ashworth-King, Angelo State University

Sean Henry, University of Victoria, “Erato vs. ‘The donghill kind’: The Moral Poetics of Spenser’s The Teares of the Muses.”

Spenser uses the adjective “donghill” as a gloss for both morally corrupt and technically inept love poetry.

Rachel E. Hile, Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, “Satirizing the Quean: Venus as Elizabeth in Spenser’s Muiopotmos and Dymoke’s Caltha Poetarum.”  

This paper examines the intertextual connection between Spenser’s Muiopotmos and Tailboys Dymoke’s long ignored satiric allegory Caltha Poetarum. Dymoke’s often bewildering allegory becomes clearer if we read it with Spenser’s poem in mind, particularly the episode of Venus’s jealousy. The Catholic Dymoke uses the episode to satirize Queen Elizabeth, giving us insight as to how contemporary readers interpreted the Venus episode from Muiopotmos.

-JS

Panel: Sir Philip Sidney and His Contemporaries

Organizer: Scott C. Lucas, The Citadel

Chair: Joel Davis, Stetson University

Karen Nelson, University of Maryland, "Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and their Pastoral Choreographies."

This paper theorizes that early modern choreographies of the pavan, the galliard, and the brawnle offer a way to comprehend narrative structures in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, Philip Sidney's Arcadia, and William Shakespeare's As You Like It. These narratives and these dances share such conventions as a reliance on symmetry, embellishments, ornaments, and flourishes, contained within complex measures, invocations of common character types, as well as the overarching patterns of circles and interwoven shapes. Authors' abilities to manipulate these formal constraints and generic expectations allow them to comment upon religious politics, as well as other controversial aspects of the 1580s and 90s.

-KN

Panel: Spenser: Modern Perspectives

Organizer: Scott C. Lucas, The Citadel

Chair: Sarah Van der Laan, Indiana University

Julia Griffin, Georgian Southern University, “‘So Far as her Veil Allows’: C. S. Lewis and Spenser’s Images of Love.”

This paper charts Spenser’s influence on C.S. Lewis and Lewis’s influence on Spenserians in her paper.  After examining the titular myth in both Apuleius and Spenser, the paper turns to Lewis’s own novel Till We have Faces, arguing that it shows Lewis creatively furthering Spenser’s own ideas on this ultimate allegory of love. If in Spenser appearances may be false, in Lewis non-appearance may constitute the ultimate truth.

Jonathan Sircy, Charleston Southern University, “Taking ‘Serious’ Seriously: A Spenserian Inclination.”

This paper surveys the ways critics have alternately praised and condemned Spenser’s seriousness. The paper argues that it is best to see Spenserian seriousness as a performance, one, that when coupled with the word “play,” yields within the reader an interpretive fidelity to Spenser’s work. “Serious play” is not just something readers find in The Faerie Queene, but something they do.

-JS

From the Spenser Roundtable: Humans, Non-Humans, and Other Beings in Spenser's Work:

Andrew Escobedo, Ohio University, “Are Personifications Persons?” 

This paper juxtaposes the modern and pre-modern ideas of literary personification. While modern theorists see personification as a movement from subjectivity to objecthood—from person to object—pre-modern writers, including Spenser, imagined the process in a completely opposite way, as a movement from inanimate to animate objects. The paper closes with a consideration of Malbecco, a pre-modern prosopopoetic exception that proves the rule.

David Quint, Yale University, “Satyrane, Lions, Satyrs, and Fauns.”

This paper finds in Spenser’s fauns and satyrs satirical symbols for both the disenchantment of the world and secularization of literature. The paper looks at The Faerie Queene I.vi—an example of the satyrs’ natural instinct to religion—and III.x—where the satyrs are more profane—then uses Faunus from the Mutabilitie Cantos as a way to assess how the satyrs, who were relics of the enchanted world, were also the agents of that disenchantment.

Anthony Welch, University of Tennessee, “Cannibal, Satyr, Poet: Spenser’s Anthropology and Anthropophagy.”

This paper looks at what is provisionally called the “pre-human” in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. The paper argues that we should look at The Faerie Queene’s non-human characters not just in spatial and geographical terms—psychological/moral allegories or colonial projections—but in historical terms. Consequently, the paper locates in The Faerie Queene VI.viii-ix two contrasting views of cultural history: one a fall from a Golden Age, the other an evolutionary view that charts a course from bloody tribalism (and its attendant cannibalism) to tenuous civilization.

Kathryn M. Walls, Victoria University of Wellington, “The Sub-human as Super-human: Una’s Christ-like Animal Companions.”

This paper argues that the lamb, ass, and lion of The Faerie Queene Book I are not only like Una but like the divine trinity itself. 

Matthew Zarnowiecki, Auburn University, “‘Though they man surpas’: Spenser’s Non-Human Poetics.”

This paper examines poetic progress in Spenser’s Four Hymns. This progress is not just hierarchical but temporal. Using Spenser’s representations of angels to pursue this line of thought, the paper considers how, in Spenser, humans both follow and are followed by celestial beings and come to define themselves as human in that pursuit.

-JS

Panel: Edmund Spenser and the Question of Genre

Organizer: Scott C. Lucas, The Citadel

Chair: Ayesha Ramachandran, SUNY Stony Brook

Erin Peterson, Holy Names University,“Edmund Spenser and the Grim Future of Romance”

In her paper “Edmund Spenser and the Grim Future of Romance,” Erin Peterson reads Spenser’s approach to the romance genre in The Faerie Queene, Book VI as being unique in Renaissance literature. Peterson argues that Book VI’s romance elements are intrusive rather than simply digressive. These romance intrusions ultimately undo Spenser’s narrative, making it impossible for him to finish his epic project.

--KC

Panel: Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene

Organizer: Scott C. Lucas, The Citadel

Chair: Robert E. Stillman, University of Tennessee

Denna Iammarino, Case Western Reserve University, “Reason/able Arguments: Hookerian Reason and the Nature of Virtue in Artegall’s Episode with the Giant”

In “Reason/able Arguments: Hookerian Reason and the Nature of Virtue in Artegall’s Episode with the Giant,” Denna Iammarino reads Spenser’s portrayal of truth in Artegall’s episode with the Giant through Hooker’s emphasis on “things indifferent.” According to her reading, the Giant wrongly interprets religious truth as a counterpoint to falseness whereas Artegall correctly understands that truth is an act of interpretation that does not rely on false dichotomies.

--KC

Jerrod Rosenbaum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,“Spenser’s Two Merlins in Faerie Queene 3.3”

In “Spenser’s Two Merlins inFaerie Queene3.3,” Jerrod Rosenbaum argues that the neglected character of Merlin deserves more critical attention. He claims that scholarship has failed to reconcile Merlin’s magic with Christianity because there are actually two Merlins: Merlin A and Merlin B. Merlin A derives from a medieval tradition incongruous with Protestant doctrine. Spenser rehabilitates this tradition through Merlin B, portraying the wizard as a Christian providential prophet.

--KC

Sarah Van der Laan, Indiana University, “Guyon and the Absence of Grace: Rethinking the Religious Paradigms of Faerie Queene 1 and 2”

In “Guyon and the Absence of Grace: Rethinking the Religious Paradigms of Faerie Queene 1 and 2,” Sarah Van der Laan argues that Spenser pushes against Protestant doctrine’s extreme rejection of the act of penance in The Faerie Queene, Book II. Whereas the Redcrosse Knight’s penitential experience in the House of Holiness allows him to learn from his mistakes, Sir Guyon must abstain completely from experiences that could potentially lead to error in the House of Mammon. Spenser thus exposes how Protestantism’s focus on grace through faith alone fostered a fear of error and experience, questioning the adequacy of individual repentance.

--KC

Panel: Marriage and the Maternal in Edmund Spenser’s Poetry

Organizer: Scott C. Lucas, The Citadel

Chair: Susannah Monta, University of Notre Dame

Rachel Zlatkin, University of Cincinnati,“Birthing an Errour”

In “Birthing an Errour,” Rachel Zlatkin deploys psychoanalytic theory to examine the meaning and significance of the Redcrosse Knight’s armor during his fight with Errour. Wrapped around Redcrosse Knight's armored body, Errour's figure refigures the body inside as the porous spatial entity the armor works to deny. Through a close reading of this episode, Zlatkin further explores Errour's multiple returns in figments of the landscape and her continued relevance to the knight inside the armor.

--KC

Laura Creel, Florida International University,“Arthur and Una: Mis-pairings and Delays in The Faerie Queene, Book 1”

In “Arthur and Una: Mis-pairings and Delays in The Faerie Queene, Book 1,” Laura Creel argues that the pattern of delayed and deferred marriages evident in Book I of The Faerie Queene sits in dialogue with a frustrated millennialism in early modern England. By reading Spenser’s marriage plots alongside evangelical references to the marriage supper of the Lamb in Revelations, she links the delay of marriage in Book I with the promise and perpetual deferral of apocalypse felt by many Protestants in late Elizabethan England.

--KC

Katharine Cleland, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, “English National Identity and the Problem of Clandestine Marriage in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book I”

In “English National Identity and the Problem of Clandestine Marriage in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book I,” Katharine Cleland shows that Spenser uses the relationship between the Redcrosse Knight and Duessa to enter into the Reformation discourse on clandestine marriage. By having the King of Eden reject the Redcrosse Knight’s clandestine contract with Duessa in canto xii, Spenser proposes that England’s next step in becoming the early modern world’s bastion of Protestantism is to eliminate the Roman canon law that condoned religious deviance within the marriage ritual. --KC

--KC

Panel: Aspects of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

Organizer: Scott C. Lucas, The Citadel

Chair and Comment: Julia Griffin, Georgia Southern University

Jamie Gillhespy, Florida Gulf Coast University, “‘I Fonder Loue a Shade, the Body Far Exyld’: Fame and Representations of Elizabeth I in Pre-Celebrity England”

In “‘I Fonder Loue a Shade, the Body Far Exyld’: Fame and Representations of Elizabeth I in Pre-Celebrity England,”Jamie Gillhespy explores the key mimetic representations of Queen Elizabeth I in The Faerie Queene and other works from the period that were dedicated, for a variety of reasons, to the public myth of Queen Elizabeth.  This exploration sheds light on the construction of public identity in the earliest days of celebrity, demonstrating how the Queen’s mirrors continue to project an image that is at once virtuous and marvelous. 

--KC

William Heise, Independent Scholar, “Shadows of Inequality in Redcrosse’s Subordination to the Palmer”

(abstract unavailable)