Edmund Spenser and the Place of Commentary

Lewis’s “effort of the historical imagination” in The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition—commensurate with his innate romanticism—bolstered by like-minded writers as his sources, resulted in his reconstructing of Courtly Love and its characters as a fantasy. While this approach limited his understanding of Courtly Love, its origins and its relationship to marriage and adultery, it allowed him to create a mythology of a Religion of Love: a “quasi-religion” of “service love” between a chevalier/poet and his sovereign lady, under the auspices of the god Amor. This view would elevate the medieval Anglo-French allegorical poem, which he will discuss in the following chapters of his book, as the foundation of the best of poetry that led to Chaucer and Edmund Spenser, his favorite poet.

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Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance

10.1093/oso/9780198834694.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Katarzyna Lecky

Keyword(s):

Edmund Spenser ◽

Ben Jonson ◽

English Renaissance ◽

Ordinary People ◽

William Davenant ◽

Samuel Daniel ◽

The Government ◽

Political Agents ◽

Cheap Print ◽

Print Industry

If maps are instruments of power, then it matters that in Renaissance Britain they were often found in the pockets of ordinary people. Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance demonstrates how early modern British poets paid by the state adapted inclusive modes of nationhood charted by inexpensive, small-format maps. It places chapbooks (“cheapbooks”) by Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, William Davenant, and John Milton into conversation with the portable cartography circulating in the same retail print industry. Domestic pocket maps were designed for heavy use by a broad readership that included those on the fringes of literacy. The era’s de facto laureates all banked their success as writers appealing to this burgeoning market share by drawing the nation as the property of the commonwealth rather than the Crown. This book investigates the accessible world of small-format cartography as it emerges in the texts of the poets raised in the expansive public sphere in which pocket maps flourished. It works at the intersections of space, place, and national identity to reveal the geographical imaginary shaping the flourishing business of cheap print. Its placement of poetic economies within mainstream systems of trade also demonstrates how cartography and poetry worked together to mobilize average consumers as political agents. This everyday form of geographic poiesis was also a strong platform for poets writing for monarchs and magistrates when their visions of the nation ran counter to the interests of the government.

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Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser on Transnational Governance and the Future of Christendom

Renaissance Quarterly ◽

10.1017/rqx.2021.1 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 74 (2) ◽

pp. 369-411

Author(s):

Brian C. Lockey

Keyword(s):

Edmund Spenser ◽

Charles Taylor ◽

Transnational Governance ◽

Sacred Spaces ◽

Religious Conflicts ◽

The Future ◽

History Of

This article considers the writings of Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser within the context of European religious conflicts between Protestants and Catholics, amid the perceived Ottoman threat to Christendom. In their fictional works, these authors imagine an overarching authority that might replace the traditional papal power of oversight and deposing in order to regulate temporal sovereigns and foster a unity of Christian princes within Europe. Even as they can be read as reimagining Christendom, their fictional works reflect what Charles Taylor has called the “disenchantment” of sacred spaces within his philosophical history of the emergence of secularity within European cultures.

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