Emblems of Temperance in The Faerie Queene, Book II

2021 ◽  
pp. 4-10
Author(s):  
Alastair Fowler
Keyword(s):  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Surface Decoration ◽  
The Faerie Queene

This chapter discusses the emblems of temperance in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book II. It was Spenser’s invariable practice to build into the imagery of The Faerie Queene, at strategic points, the traditional emblems of the virtue whose legend he was writing. These emblems must once have helped to make at least the main drift of his allegory widely intelligible; but unfortunately it no longer works like that. In Book II, where emblems are heavily relied on for structure as well as for imagery, either their existence is now not even noticed, or else they are treated as mere surface decoration. Yet they are essential to Spenser’s method, which is oblique, working indirectly through details. The chapter focuses on perhaps the most common emblem of temperance in The Faerie Queene: the pouring of water into wine. This emblem makes the least obvious appearance, but only because it is developed on a scale not expected; it is hidden, only because it is most deeply structural.

The Faerie Queene

1970 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Of Reformed Versifying

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Rhodes
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Native Form ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
English Verse ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Mean ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Stylistic Ideal

This chapter examines how the development of English poetry in the second half of the sixteenth century is characterized by the search for an appropriate style. In this context, ‘reformed versifying’ may be understood as a reconciliation of high and low in which the common is reconfigured as a stylistic ideal of the mean. That development can be traced in debates about prosody where an alternative sense of ‘reformed versifying’ as adapting classical metres to English verse is rejected in favour of native form. At the same time Sidney recuperates poetry by reforming it as an agent of virtue. Reformation and Renaissance finally come together in Spenser, who realizes Erasmus’ aim of harmonizing the values of classical literature with Christian doctrine, and reconciles the foreign and the ‘homewrought’. The Faerie Queene of 1590 represents the triumph of the mean in both style and, through its celebration of marriage, in substance.

Cain’s Castles

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Milbank
Keyword(s):  
Early Christianity ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Protestant Church ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Acts And Monuments

In Chapter 1, the Reformation is presented as the paradigmatic site of Gothic escape: the evil monastery can be traced back to Wycliffe’s ‘Cain’s castles’ and the fictional abbey ruin to the Dissolution. Central Gothic tropes are shown to have their origin in this period: the Gothic heroine is compared to the female martyrs of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments; the usurper figure is linked to the papal Antichrist; and the element of continuation and the establishment of the true heir is related to Reformation historiography, which needs to prove that the Protestant Church is in continuity with early Christianity—this crisis of legitimacy is repeated in the Glorious Revolution. Lastly, Gothic uncovering of hypocrisy is allied to the revelation of Catholicism as idolatry. The Faerie Queene is interpreted as a mode of Protestant Gothic and Spenser’s Una provides an allegorical gesture of melancholic distance, which will be rendered productive in later Gothic fiction.

69. Spenser’s the Faerie Queene, III, xi, 47-48

1966 ◽  
Vol 24 (8) ◽  
pp. 120-121
Author(s):  
Jean MacIntyre
Keyword(s):  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Faerie Queene
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