Sixteenth Century Society and Conference
St Louis, Missouri, USA
17-20 October, 2019
The Spenser Roundtable
Chair: Dennis Austin Britton, University of New Hampshire
Spenser and Race
Participants:
Kimberly Anne Coles, University of Maryland
Thomas L. Herron, East Carolina University
Benedict S. Robinson, Stony Brook University, SUNY
Debapriya Sarkar, University of Connecticut, Avery Point
No abstract available.
Angry Spenser
Sponsor: International Spenser Society
Organizer & Chair: Sarah Van der Laan, Indiana University
Penny McCarthy, Independent Scholar
Anger in a Mingle-Mangle, or, Fury in a Story
Nathanial B. Smith, Central Michigan University
Guyon’s Angry Occasions in the Legend of Temperance
Richard D. Brown, The Open University
Bitter ‘Despights’: Spenser and Overwhelming Complaint
Edmund Spenser: Influences and Afterlife
Organizer: Scott C. Lucas, The Citadel
Chair: Denna J. Iammarino, Case Western Reserve University
Tanya Schmidt, New York University
‘Our English Virgil’: Spenser’s 17th-Century Natural Philosophical Readers
Gillian C. Hubbard, Victoria University of Wellington
Truth, Zeal, and the Risk of Error in Martinus Magistris and Edmund Spenser
Jean R. Brink, Huntington Library
Editing Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland: Rudolf Gottfried’s Textual Philosophy
Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene
Organizer: Scott C. Lucas, The Citadel
Chair: Melissa J. Rack, University of South Carolina, Salkehatchie
Ernest P. Rufleth, Louisiana Tech University
Gentlemanly Labour: Spenser’s Faerie Queene as Reproductive Model
William A. Oram, Smith College
Losing Control: Anger in The Faerie Queene
Mary Villeponteaux, Georgia Southern University
Enter Belphoebe, Exit Diana: Exposure and its Perils in The Faerie Queene
Forms of Being in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene
Organizer: Scott C. Lucas, The Citadel
Chair: Ernest P. Rufleth, Louisiana Tech University
Jim Ellis, University of Calgary
‘A lusty boy deckt all with flowres’: Vegetal Life in The Faerie Queene
The final image in the last great pageant of The Faerie Queene, in the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie is of Life itself. There, life is figured as a ‘faire young lusty boy, … . Deckt all with flowres’ (7.7.46). This image of life can be read as a compressed version of the allegory of material creation that we get in the Garden of Adonis, where Adonis, similarly a ‘wanton boy . . lapped in flowres’, is the ‘Father of all forms’ (3.6.46, 47). A negative version of this figure can be seen in the Bower of Bliss, where Verdant, the youthful knight who has succumbed to pleasure, is found lying in a vegetal state in the arms of Acrasia.
This paper considers the image of Life as a boy decked with flowers, by looking at a particular version of Aristotle’s tripartite soul, that found in Lodowick Bryskett’s A Discourse of Civill Life. Bryskett’s dialogue features Spenser as one of its speakers. His take on the tripartite soul is a bit different than the more common one, associating concupiscence with the vegetal soul, instead of the animal one. Bryskett’s scheme is used for a reconsideration of Spenser’s portrayal of the vegetal soul in Book Two of The Faerie Queene.
Kat Addis, New York University
Spenser and Wynter: Slavery and the Idea of the Human
Spenser and His Contemporaries
Organizer: Scott C. Lucas, The Citadel
Chair: Lauren Silberman, Baruch College, CUNY
Andrew Wadoski, Oklahoma State University
Civility and Political Violence in Spenser and Shakespeare
Kathryn M. Walls, Victoria University of Wellington
The Christian Lark in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 and The Faerie Queene i.xi.51
The likening of the song sung by the lark arising (at dawn) to a hymn and of the lark as such to a
Christian worshipper is familiar to Early Modernists from instances in Herbert, Herrick and Milton.
Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the earlier lark references that are the subject of this
paper. Read in the light of the larks that appear in Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de l’Ame,
Shakespeare’s sonnet 29 takes on the character of a divine meditation, while Spenser’s application
of the image of the lark arising to the revival of Red Cross adumbrates his insistence on salvation by
grace alone.
Individual Papers
Thomas L. Herron, East Carolina University
Developing Centering Spenser: A Digital Resource for Kilcolman Castle for VR
and Pedagogical Uses
This paper traces recent developments on the open-access website, Centring Spenser: a digital resource for Kilcolman Castle. Among these developments are a new format and homepage design, to allow easier navigation; a downloadable iBook version of the website; and exploratory teaching modules programmed for use in a Virtual Reality version of the castle.
Lauren Silberman, Baruch College, CUNY
Personal and Political: Spenser vs. Marlowe in The Rape of Lucrece
MLA
Seattle, Washington, USA
9-12 January, 2020
Spenser’s Species; or, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Presider: Kimberly Anne Coles
University of Maryland, College Park
Joseph Campana, Rice University
Of Being Numerous: Monstrous Sexuality in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene
The Faerie Queene, which one might sometimes be tempted to call the Psychopathia Sexualis of its era, lingers on figures of monstrous sexuality. Hellenore ruts like a beast with the satyrs, initiating the transformation of her crude husband Malbecco into the figure of Jealousy. Lust rages around the landscape of the Legend of Friendship, in the form of enraged, ambulatory, and ceaselessly hungering genitalia. Argante and Ollyphant, the twin giants, figure the bad objects par excellence of sexuality in the Legend of Chastity who ‘mingled’ sexually in the womb before their birth and whose incest thus guaranteed ‘that in monstrous wise did to the world appere // So liu’d they euer after in like sin, / Gainst natures law, and good behauioure’. It comes as no surprise that Argante, ‘all the countrey she did raunge, / To seeke young men, to quench her flaming thurst, / And feed her fancy with delightfull change’ while Ollyphant ‘surpassed his sex masculine, / In beastly vse that I did euer find’; which he proves by chasing boys. Such figures embody the monstrosity of sexuality, and while they may refer to phenomena larger than themselves, especially in the case of lust, it is important to note that, however monstrous, they are singular figures. And, indeed, the most familiar, arguably the most obvious vector for sexuality in these episodes is the formation of the monstrous individual whose bestiality or animality indicates the illicit. Despite decades of ever-more nuanced accounts of the history of sexuality we tend to come back to individual figures who may or may not prefigure identities of various eras. Often those individuals index the most conventional slide of human sexuality down the great chain of being into a bestial, animal, or monstrous world. Less easily identified, no less discussed, would be de-individualising expressions of sexuality that we might describe as numerous, grouped, or even dispersed phenomena. This essay considers sexualities that are not one, that reside in strange group formations, in extreme landscapes, or even in numbers, and that are drawn from creaturely or ecological figurations that elude the easy bestialisation of desire in the moral universe of Spenser’s Faerie Queene.
Jeffrey B. Griswold, University of Maryland, College Park
Species of the Human: Spenser’s Salvage Man and the Racial Logic of Vulnerability
Vulnerability as an ethical and political framework holds an appealing logic that gestures
towards mutuality and egalitarianism. Not surprisingly, physical precariousness has proven to be
a fruitful lens for examining early modern literature. In embracing vulnerability, however, we
have overlooked a racialising discourse that sought to naturalise servitude at the end of the
sixteenth century. Early modern writers looked to Aristotle, who grounds natural slavery in the
racialised body of the ‘barbarian’. The Politics contends that whereas the natural slave has a
strong and sufficient body, the master is feeble and in need of the slave’s labor.
This paper rereads the Salvage Man in Book VI of The Faerie Queene in light of late sixteenth-
century commentary on the Politics to consider how the episode racialises voluntary servitude.
Spenserians have grappled with the conflicting resonances the character evokes. On the one
hand, he is a wild man, without language or society. On the other, he is ‘of noble blood’, a
quality that reveals itself through courteous behaviour (VI.v.2). While other scholars have read the
episode as a representation of either the Irish or of a universal human, I contend that Spenser is
putting two racial theories into conflict: one grounded on hereditary blood and one on somatic
difference. That the Salvage Man is ‘invulnerable’ ‘from his mothers wombe’ has gone nearly
undiscussed, as has the character’s nonwhite status (VI.iv.4). I connect these details to early
modern Aristotelianism as it considered the inheritability of a servile nature. Spenser, moreover
contrasts the Salvage Man’s indomitable strength with Serena’s vulnerable whiteness, thereby
naturalising this relationship. In considering the entanglement of rank and race, I build on recent
scholarship by Patricia Akhimie, Urvashi Chakravarty, Kimberly Coles, and Jean Feerick. In
returning to early modern racial thinking, this paper also allows us to reflect on how modern
white supremacists have taken up the mantle of vulnerability and oppression in recent years.
Mira Kafantaris, Ohio State University, Columbus
Disgust, Wonder, and the Perils of Strange Queenship in Spenser’s The Fairie Queene
In Spenser’s courtly romance, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), the anxiety around queenship and power becomes a crucial site on which affective control is enacted. Where white womanhood secures the future of the Reformed realm, foreign queens emblematise the threat of infection, which can permeate the commonwealth religiously, culturally, or physiologically. In this essay, I argue that The Faerie Queene’s affective constructions of racial identities provide the lens through which a foreign queen’s racial otherness, namely her moral degeneration, sexual transgression, and religious idolatry, is made legible. Tracing the politicised genealogies of Una and Duessa in Book 1, I situate these allegorised royal women within different strands of racial ideologies, including religion, moral qualities, material surroundings, and sexuality. Then, I dwell on their affective capacities, namely wonder, desire, and disgust, which illuminate our understanding of how affect, geopolitics, and racial purity aligned.
Roundtable: Spenser and the Digital Humanities
At the intersection between Spenser studies and the digital humanities, panelists present new developments: the forthcoming digital edition of Spenser’s Complete Works, novel ways of visualizing and disseminating his texts, and more. What will the challenges and the opportunities of digitally inflected Spenser scholarship be in the future?
Presider: Lise Jaillant, Loughborough University
Panelists:
Anupam Basu, Washington University in St. Louis
Craig Berry, Independent Scholar
Joseph Foster Loewenstein, Washington University in St. Louis
John Ladd, Northwestern University
Roundtable: Spenser, Ecology, and the Dream of a Legible Environment
Engaging with current trends in early modern ecocriticism and conceptions of the nonhuman, panelists explore how Edmund Spenser’s allegorical poetics can help broaden current conceptions of anthropogenic environmental change. Spenser’s experiments in English poetics and in allegorical and narrative structures and his engagement with environments that are both symbolic and historical make his works especially ripe for ecocritical analysis.
Presider: Steve Mentz, St. John’s University, NY
Panelists:
Brent Dawson, University of Oregon
Joseph Campana, Rice University
William Rhodes, University of Iowa
Alexander McAdams, Rice University
Tiffany Jo Werth, University of California, Davis
Dyani Johns Taff, Ithaca College
Individual Papers:
Ross Lerner, Occidental College
Racial Allegory in The Faerie Queene
Kimberly Anne Coles, University of Maryland, College Park
The Safety of Objects: Materials of Political Resistance in Donne and Spenser
Paul Zajac, McDaniel College
Epic Peace: Despair about Violence in Spenser’s Faerie Queene
How can Edmund Spenser, a notoriously emphatic apologist for English violence in Ireland, write an allegorical epic about the battles of the Red Cross Knight while still exploring the relationship between holiness, poetry, and peace? In this paper, I bring readings of Faerie Queene I, especially Joseph Campana’s account of the ‘pain of Reformation’, into dialogue with peace studies. Specifically, I consider Despair’s condemnation of Red Cross’s violence in canto nine and Heavenly’s Contemplations discussion of peace in canto ten. Although Una rebuts several of Despair’s arguments, she does not deny his claim that ‘those great battels, which thou boasts to win … hereafter deare thou shalt repent’ (I.ix.43.3-5). By assuring Red Cross that he has a part in ‘heauenly mercies’, she tacitly admits that the blood he spills requires mercy from God (53.4). The hermit Heavenly Contemplation confirms this when he says, ‘bloud can nought but sin, & wars but sorrowes yield’ (x.60.9), even as he instructs the knight to slay the dragon and complete his military service for Gloriana. Una and Contemplation prevent Red Cross from committing suicide and help to heal his spiritual wounds, but they also redirect his violent acts for narrative and allegorical purposes that take a spiritual, psychological, and aesthetic toll. By scrutinising the conventions of epic and the metaphors of Christian combat, Book I explores whether it is possible in the sixteenth century to bear the mark of a bloodied cross without also bloodying one’s hands.
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