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‘By Cyphers, or by Magicke Mighf’: Prophecy and History

Bart van Es

in Spenser’s Forms of History

This chapter examines the attempts made to extend beyond historical endings through the practice of ‘political prophecy’. It is concerned with the changeable reading of old histories. It shows how ... More

This chapter examines the attempts made to extend beyond historical endings through the practice of ‘political prophecy’. It is concerned with the changeable reading of old histories. It shows how the ‘Briton history’, so important in justifying the Tudor dynasty, was also the core narrative of highly subversive manuscript prophecies. It explains that such prophecies multiplied at crisis points in Elizabeth's reign. It adds that they were not only themselves culled from existing histories, they also made routine use of history in order to validate their own supposed prognostications. It establishes Spenser's personal contact with those involved in astrological prophecy, and, as a result, forwards a new understanding of the allusive strategies of The Shepheardes Calendar and the Spenser/Harvey Letters. Investigating the prophecies delivered to Britomart in The Faerie Queene, Books III and V, the chapter argues that this, ultimately, is the most dangerous form that historical narrative can take.Less

‘Perpetuall Reformation’ in Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene

Virginia Lee Strain

in Legal Reform in English Renaissance Literature

This chapter offers a close reading of Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, which represents the reformation of law in terms of both its equitable correction and its administration. The Knight of ... More

This chapter offers a close reading of Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, which represents the reformation of law in terms of both its equitable correction and its administration. The Knight of Justice, Artegall, corrects regional law and governance across a number of historical allegories that most frequently allude to the sixteenth-century English efforts to colonise Ireland. Yet his methods and success are called into question not only through his defeat in combat by Radigund, but also through his rescue that is accomplished by his fiancé. As Britomart travels back through Faerieland, retracing the knight’s steps in order to liberate him from thraldom to the Amazon, we discover that the countryside has not been subdued in the wake of his reformation of justice. Britomart’s re-enactments of the knight’s battles re-present the activities of legal reform and governance as ongoing tasks requiring consistent magisterial presence and attention. This chapter appears at the beginning of the book not only for chronological reasons, but because the matter introduces a number of topics and contexts that will be developed at greater length in the studies that follow, including legal and character education, Aristotelian legal equity, artificial reason, and itinerant justice.Less

Hierarchic architecture in The Faerie Queene

Robert Lanier Reid

in Renaissance Psychologies: Spenser and Shakespeare

Christian Platonic hierarchy shapes Spenser’s epic: a hierarchic family triad, three stages of fall and of recovery. Spenser radically revises this allegory, blamingman, whomwoman lovingly seeks to ... More

Christian Platonic hierarchy shapes Spenser’s epic: a hierarchic family triad, three stages of fall and of recovery. Spenser radically revises this allegory, blamingman, whomwoman lovingly seeks to cure. Books 3-5 show Britomart’s chaste power defeating all males, freeing woman from mastery and self-induced suffering. Theintellective allegory of books 1 and 2reform higher reason, then lower reason, each intripartite form:a triadic family, triple temptings, three-phasetraining of the spiritual and then natural bodies, ending withatriadic Eden.The passional allegory of books 3 and 4 is again transcendent, then immanent. Britomart brings female ascendancy by chaste skill with arms and providential goals. Sheunfolds in three heroic Graces (Florimell, Belphoebe, Amoret). In these passional books the male counterparts (Artegall, Marinell, Timias, Scudamour) are paralyzed;virtuous reunion comes by female prowess and endurance, aided by mothers and female deities. A female theologyrests on virginity and marriage, immaculate conception, Trinitarian identity, epiphanic unveilings, female endurance of a Passion. The sensate allegory of books 5 and 6 subject even Gloriana/Mercilla and Arthur toconfusing materialism. Does the ontological ‘dilation’ of books 1-6 (narrowing images of Duessa, Timias, and satyrs-salvages)show despondency about Irish terrors, or prepare for reversal in books 7-12?Less

“Waues of weary wretchednesse”: Florimell and the sea

Margaret Christian

in Spenserian Allegory and Elizabethan Biblical Exegesis: A Context for the Faerie Queene

This chapter examines sermon uses of the image of the sea and the ship to demonstrate that the ocean, for Elizabethans, represented not only a realm of magic and fertility but also the spiritual ... More

This chapter examines sermon uses of the image of the sea and the ship to demonstrate that the ocean, for Elizabethans, represented not only a realm of magic and fertility but also the spiritual dangers of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Sermons by Stephen Gosson, Richard Madox, Robert Wilkinson (among others) as well as Geneva Bible illustrations and glosses, provide parallels for Britomart’s lament at III.iv and a key to the moral meaning of the various settings of Florimell’s adventures: her near-rape by the fisherman, imprisonment by Proteus at III.viii-ix, and rescue by Cymoent in IV.xii. The sea setting sharpens the point of narrative references to divine intervention, and the sermons show how these episodes’ sea settings make sense for Spenser’s dramatizing the incompleteness of the single life that propels men and women toward their destiny of married love.Less

Resisting Translation: Britomart in Book 3 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene

Harry Berger Jr.

David Lee Miller (ed.)

in Resisting Allegory: Interpretive Delirium in Spenser's Faerie Queene

This chapter examines the manifestation of the “castration principle” in the legend of Britomart. Its power is explicitly invested not only in the allegorical and magical violence of antipoetic ... More

This chapter examines the manifestation of the “castration principle” in the legend of Britomart. Its power is explicitly invested not only in the allegorical and magical violence of antipoetic scapegoats—the witch, Proteus, and Busirane—but also in the apparently benign patrons of patriarchal order and continuity. Britomart's violent awakening to love, her induction into the heterosexual regime of the translatio imperii, is presided over by Merlin, an agent whose motives and career are shown to be dominated by gynephobia and the fantasy of castration.Less