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Grammatical gender and the gender of allegory in The Faerie Queene
by Laetitia Sansonetti

Recently, as I was idly scrolling through social media posts before a day’s work, something caught my eye: a post by a restaurant in Britain which solemnly announced, ‘Here she is … Our menu in all her glory’. As a French native speaker in whose mother tongue the word ‘menu’ is grammatically masculine, I would not have expected a female personification of an inanimate “masculine” noun. As a specialist of English, I might have expected a neutral pronoun instead, and would not have been surprised to read ‘Here it is … Our menu in all its glory’. As a Spenserian, I should have known better. Read more…

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Cite as:

Laetitia Sansonetti, "Grammatical gender and the gender of allegory in The Faerie Queene ," Spenser Review (Fall 2022).
http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/review/volume-52/523/grammatical-gender-and-the-gender-of-allegory-in-the-faerie-queene
Accessed June 5th, 2023.
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