Tiffany Jo Werth, Simon Fraser University

RSA Abstract San Diego 2013

Panel: Spenser and the Human

“Degendered”: Spenser’s Stonie Age of Man

In The Arte of English Poesie, Puttenham defines “prosopopoeia” as a rhetorical term that attributes “any humane quality, as reason or speech to dombe creatures or other insensible things.” Spenser exploits this trope by providing foxes, apes, and a Blatant Beast with biting tongues that can speak what a man may not. But he also applies this trope on a larger scale; mankind, Spenser (following Ovid) laments, lives in an Iron Age, an age full of “wicked maladie,” a “stonie one” (“Mother Hubbards Tale” 8; Faerie Queene proem Bk 5). Here, Spenser ascribes an insensible thing, an “age,” with ethical and moral—but in- and non-human—characteristics. In this “age,” men of “flesh and bone” risk being “degendered,” “transformed into hardest stone” (FQ proem Bk 5). What, we might ask, can Iron or stone say to us (or about us) that otherwise might remain mute? This paper quarries Spenser’s “degendering” of Iron and man, human and stone, to put pressure on the distinction between what Jane Bennett recently termed “dull” and “vibrant” categories of matter. Spenser’s prosopopoeia, I argue, presents us with an indistinct vision of the human and invites reflection on what it means to inhabit a world both indifferent and intimately continuous with us.

Keywords: Spenser, Renaissance, nonhuman Renaissance

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