The Cross cult, King Oswald, and Elizabethan historiography

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-57
Author(s):  
Paul J. Stapleton
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
Religious Controversy ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cross ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
The Church ◽  
Made In

In Thomas Stapleton’s The History of the Church of Englande (1565), the first modern English translation of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, the cross cult is promoted as a definitive element of English religious and national identity, via the legend of the Saxon king Oswald. The version of the legend in Stapleton’s narrative, which includes textual supplements like illustrations, appears to be intended as a corrective in light of attacks upon the cross cult made in works of religious controversy by the reformists William Turner, John Jewel, and James Calfhill, but also in works of historiography such as the 1559 edition of Robert Fabyan’s Chronicle. In response to Stapleton’s expanded presentation of the Oswald legend, John Foxe reconfigures the narrative in the 1570 Acts and Monuments or Book of Martyrs, but in a bifurcated manner, perhaps to appease members of Matthew Parker’s circle of Saxon scholars. Surprisingly, in Book Three of The Faerie Queene (1590), Edmund Spenser carries on Stapleton’s iconodule understanding of Oswald’s cross in contrast to his reformist Protestant precursors.1

Renaissance Epics: Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser

2019 ◽  
pp. 97-135
Author(s):  
Peter Mack
Keyword(s):  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Torquato Tasso ◽  
Ludovico Ariosto ◽  
Orlando Furioso ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Faerie Queene

This chapter takes a look at Orlando Furioso (1516, 1532), Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), and The Faerie Queene (1596), which are the recognized epic masterpieces of their eras. They draw in succession on each other and on a wide range of classical and romance texts, many of them known to the first audiences of these three poems. The chapter investigates the ways in which Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, and Edmund Spenser used their predecessors and the different effects they achieved from a shared heritage. It examines the ways in which a series of authors used both their immediate predecessors and their sense of a long tradition of epic writing to create something new. The chapter argues that Ariosto aimed to shock and surprise his audience. Tasso reacted to Ariosto by combining a more serious and unified epic on the lines of the Iliad. Spenser's idea of devoting each book to a hero and a virtue presents a structure which is easier to comprehend than Ariosto's, yet looser and more open to surprises than Tasso's.

is generally compatible with the teaching of the common and vulgar pride in the power of this world’ Reformed church, and therefore with doctrines (cited Var 1.423). Readers today, who rightly query found in the Book of Common Prayer and the hom-any labelling of Spenser’s characters, may query just ilies, rather than as a system of beliefs. See J.N. Wall how the knight’s pride, if he is proud, is personified 1988:88–127. by Orgoglio. Does he fall through pride? Most cer-Traditional interpretations of Book I have been tainly he falls: one who was on horseback lies upon either moral, varying between extremes of psycho-the ground, first to rest in the shade and then to lie logical and spiritual readings, or historical, varying with Duessa; and although he staggers to his feet, he between particular and general readings. Both were soon falls senseless upon the ground, and finally is sanctioned by the interpretations given the major placed deep underground in the giant’s dungeon. classical poets and sixteenth-century romance writers. The giant himself is not ‘identified’ until after the For example, in 1632 Henry Reynolds praised The knight’s fall, and then he is named Orgoglio, not Faerie Queene as ‘an exact body of the Ethicke doc-Pride. Although he is said to be proud, pride is only trine’ while wishing that Spenser had been ‘a little one detail in a very complex description. In his size, freer of his fiction, and not so close riuetted to his descent, features, weapon, gait, and mode of fight-Morall’ (Sp All 186). In 1642 Henry More praised ing, he is seen as a particular giant rather than as a it as ‘a Poem richly fraught within divine Morality particular kind of pride. To name him such is to as Phansy’, and in 1660 offers a historical reading of select a few words – and not particularly interesting Una’s reception by the satyrs in I vi 11–19, saying ones – such as ‘arrogant’ and ‘presumption’ out of that it ‘does lively set out the condition of Chris-some twenty-six lines or about two hundred words, tianity since the time that the Church of a Garden and to collapse them into pride because pride is one became a Wilderness’ (Sp All 210, 249). Both kinds of the seven deadly sins. To say that the knight falls of readings continue today though the latter often through pride ignores the complex interactions of all tends to be restricted to the sociopolitical. An influ-the words in the episode. While he is guilty of sloth ential view in the earlier twentieth century, expressed and lust before he falls, he is not proud; in fact, he by Kermode 1971:12–32, was that the historical has just escaped from the house of Pride. Quite allegory of Book I treats the history of the true deliberately, Spenser seeks to prevent any such moral church from its beginnings to the Last Judgement identification by attributing the knight’s weakness in its conflict with the Church of Rome. According before Orgoglio to his act of ignorantly drinking the to this reading, the Red Cross Knight’s subjection enfeebling waters issuing from a nymph who, like to Orgoglio in canto vii refers to the popish captivity him, rested in the midst of her quest. of England from Gregory VII to Wyclif (about 300 Although holiness is a distinctively Christian years: the three months of viii 38; but see n); and the virtue, Book I does not treat ‘pilgrim’s progress from six years that the Red Cross Knight must serve the this world to that which is to come’, as does Bunyan, Faerie Queene before he may return to Eden refers but rather the Red Cross Knight’s quest in this world to the six years of Mary Tudor’s reign when England on a pilgrimage from error to salvation; see Prescott was subject to the Church of Rome (see I xii 1989. His slaying the dragon only qualifies him to 18.6–8n). While interest in the ecclesiastical history enter the antepenultimate battle as the defender of of Book I continues, e.g. in Richey 1998:16–35, the Faerie Queene against the pagan king (I xii 18), usually it is directed more specifically to its imme-and only after that has been accomplished may he diate context in the Reformation (King 1990a; and start his climb to the New Jerusalem. As a con-Mallette 1997 who explores how the poem appro-sequence, the whole poem is deeply rooted in the priates and parodies overlapping Reformation texts); human condition: it treats our life in this world, or Reformation doctrines of holiness (Gless 1994); under the aegis of divine grace, more comprehens-or patristic theology (Weatherby 1994); or Reforma-ively than any other poem in English. tion iconoclasm (Gregerson 1995). The moral allegory of Book I, as set down by Ruskin in The Stones of Venice (1853), remains gener- Temperance: Book II

2014 ◽  
pp. 31-31
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
New Jerusalem ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Church

“To hear the rest untold“: Shakespeare's Postponed Endings

1984 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Kay
Keyword(s):  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Faerie Queene

According to Edmund Spenser, trivial art was merely “painted forgery,” no more than “th'aboundance of an idle braine.” Its antithesis, exemplified by The Faerie Queene, was “matter of just memory” (FQ II.Proem, i). In this distinction, the double sense of “just,” i.e. both “righteous” and “exact,” tellingly suggests the response he desired—demanded even—from readers of his epic. Other works aspiring to the status of high art similarly make demands upon their audience which implicitly continue into the memory of the reader or viewer. It was thus, Ben Jonson argued, that the text of a masque could be elevated above the mere physical spectacle of its performance: it was in the imagination of the audience that the “more removed mysteries,” only shadowed forth in the action of the show, could be fully subjected to the understanding (rather than simply experienced externally by the sense) of the beholders.

The Works of Edmund Spenser. A Variorum Edition. The Faerie Queene, Book II

1934 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 346
Author(s):  
B. E. C. Davis ◽  
Edwin Greenlaw ◽  
Charles Grosvenor Osgood ◽  
Frederick Morgan Padelford ◽  
Edmund Spenser
Keyword(s):  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Variorum Edition

The Plot of The Faerie Queene

PMLA ◽  
1932 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Blair
Keyword(s):  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
Central Image ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
The Ideal

Courthope, in his History of English Poetry, asks the question: “Does Spenser's work satisfy the test of Unity which must be applied to every great creation of art?” Answering this question, Courthope thinks that there is undoubtedly poetical unity in the general conception of The Shepherd's Calendar. But of the Faerie Queene, he says the following:There is undoubtedly a noble, indeed a sublime, foundation for the poem in its central design “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.” There is also something eminently poetical in the intention of embodying this image in the ideal knight—a figure consecrated like that of the shepherd, by ancient literary tradition—and in the person of “Arthur before he was king.” Moreover, as the subject was to be treated allegorically, it was open to Spenser to endow his knight with the “twelve private moral virtues, as Aristotle hath devised.” … No poem in existence can compare with the Faery Queen in the richness of its materials. But the question occurs: In what way is all this “variety of matter” fused with the central image of the “brave knight, perfected in all the twelve private moral virtues”? For this, we must always remember, was Spenser's professed and primary motive; he chose to convey his moral in a form of allegorical narrative, because he thought it would be “most plausible and pleasing, being covered with an historical fiction.”

“Like Race to Runne”: The Parallel Structure of the Faerie Queene, Books I and II

PMLA ◽  
1958 ◽  
Vol 73 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 327-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. C. Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Parallel Structure ◽  
Nature And Grace ◽  
Natural Man ◽  
Repetitive Structure ◽  
The Cross ◽  
The Moment ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Faerie Queene

My Purpose in this paper is to understand the allegory of The Faerie Queene more fully by examining the relation between the first two books. It has been commonly observed that these books are parallel in structure. In each, the Knight who represents a particular virtue (Holiness, Temperance) leaves the court of the Faery Queen with a guide (Una, the Palmer), and later defeats two chief antagonists (Sansfoy and Sans-joy, Pyrochles and Cymochles); upon being separated from his guide, he enters a place of temptation (the house of Pride, the cave of Mammon), and later falls. Then being rescued by Arthur and united with his guide, he enters a place of instruction (the house of Holiness, the castle of Alma) and finally fulfills his adventure (killing the Dragon, destroying the Bower of Bliss). Such paralleling has been considered part of Spenser's design expressed in the Letter to Ralegh, to write twelve books in which twelve knights, as patrons of the twelve virtues, undertake parallel adventures assigned by the Faery Queen. That the later books do not follow this repetitive structure has been variously explained as the need to avoid monotony, to modify the design according to the virtue being treated, or simply—all too simply—as a change of plan. It was left to A. S. P. Woodhouse to explain for the first time the basis of the parallel structure of the first two books. He suggests that the two orders of nature and grace which were universally accepted as a frame of reference in the Renaissance are here carefully differentiated: “what touches the Redcross Knight bears primarily upon revealed religion, or belongs to the order of grace; whatever touches Guyon bears upon natural ethics, or belongs to the order of nature” (p. 204). It follows that the parallel structure is designed to bring into relief differences which depend upon these two orders. He finds that this difference leaves its mark chiefly upon the education received by the two knights: the Redcross knight shows the bankruptcy of natural man who must utterly depend upon heavenly grace whereas Guyon shows how natural man realizes the potentialities of his nature by ruling his passions through reason (pp. 205-206). At times, he insists more strongly than does Spenser upon an absolute separation of the two orders: Guyon's reference to “the sacred badge of my Redeemers death” confuses the separation, as does the Palmer's benediction: “God guide thee, Guyon, well to end thy warke.” Even more confusing is Guyon's invocation to Christ for His Mercy at the moment when, like Longinus, he levels his spear against the Cross: “Mercie Sir knight, and mercie Lord, / For mine offence and heedlesse hardiment, / That had almost committed crime abhord” (ii.i.27). However, thanks to Woodhouse's article, there seems no doubt now that the distinction between the two orders of nature and grace provides a necessary frame of reference for understanding the parallel structure of the first two books.

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