The Christian Lark: Spenser’s Faerie Queene I. x.51 and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 200-218
Author(s):  
Kathryn Walls
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
Standard Assumption ◽  
The Third ◽  
Guardian Angel ◽  
Guillaume De Deguileville ◽  
Love Triangle

Abstract The likening of the lark to the Christian worshipper as in Herbert’s “Easter Wings” was anticipated by both Spenser and Shakespeare in references that have been overlooked to date. These stand in a tradition most richly represented by the early fourteenth- century French allegorist Guillaume de Deguileville, in his Pèlerinage de l’Ame, in which the pilgrim soul, guided towards the gate of Heaven by his guardian angel, finds himself surrounded by larks whose cruciform shapes in flying match their singing of the name “Jhesu.” Having fallen for the second time when fighting the dragon, Spenser’s Red Cross Knight rises on the third morning to find himself victorious. In his rising he is compared with the lark at dawn. The Edenic setting (which underlines the theme of the redemption of “fallen” man by the risen Christ) is also illuminated by Deguileville’s Ame; Spenser’s two trees are reminiscent of the “green and the dry” in the French allegory, according to which Christ appears as the apple pinned to the dry tree in reparation for the apple stolen by Adam. When one examines Shakespeare’s reference to the lark in Sonnet 29 in the light of the tradition represented by Deguileville (whose work not only Spenser but also Shakespeare might have read in English translation) the question arises as to whether the beloved addressed in line 10 (“thee”) could be Christ, and the speaker a Christian worshipper moving from self reproach to Christian gratitude. Such an interpretation is challenged by the standard assumption that the sonnets reflect a narrative produced by a love triangle. But from Petrarch’s Canzoniere on, sequences of love sonnets had contained poems of religious adoration.

Help to War Victims in Nigeria

1968 ◽  
Vol 8 (93) ◽  
pp. 626-633 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
International Institutions ◽  
International Committee ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
The Third ◽  
Considerable Cost ◽  
Massive Scale ◽  
Governmental Institutions ◽  
To Come ◽  
War Victims ◽  
Work Up

In our last month's issue we gave an account of ICRC relief work up to the end of October 1968 in Nigeria and the secessionist province Biafra. This clearly brought out the scale and very considerable cost of the mission which will continue for months to come. As the financial situation had reached the crisis stage, the International Committee invited representatives of governments, National Societies and international institutions, able to help it, to a meeting in Geneva, in order to explain the facts which justify not only the massive scale of, but also support for, the Red Cross action. There were in fact three meetings, one of National Societies, the second of representatives of governments and inter-governmental institutions and the third of voluntary agencies.

LANGUAGE, CULTURE, AND POWER IN GUILLEM DE TORROELLA’S LA FAULA

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
JILL ROSS
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
French Language ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
The Third ◽  
Cultural Power

This article examines the role of French language and culture in the fourteenth-century Arthurian text, La Faula, by the Mallorcan, Guillem de Torroella. Reading the appropriation of French language and literary models through the lens of earlier thirteenth-century Occitan resistance to French political and cultural hegemony, La Faula’s use of French dialogue becomes significant in light of the political tensions in the third quarter of the fourteenth century that saw the conquest of the Kingdom of Mallorca by that of Catalonia-Aragon and the subsequent imposition of Catalano-Aragonese political and cultural power. La Faula’s clear intertextual debt to French literary models and its simultaneous ambivalence about the authority and reliability of those models makes French language into a space for the exploration of the dynamics of cultural appropriation and political accommodation that were constitutive of late fourteenth-century Mallorca.

scholarly journals Basic philosophical texts in Medieval Serbia

Balcanica ◽  
2008 ◽  
pp. 79-102
Author(s):  
Boris Milosavljevic
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Social Event ◽  
Philosophical Text ◽  
Highly Educated ◽  
The Third ◽  
Philosophical Texts ◽  
High Standards ◽  
Theological Debate ◽  
Christian Platonism ◽  
Central Social

Medieval Serbian philosophy took shape mostly through the process of translating Byzantine texts and revising the Slavic translations. Apart from the Aristotelian terminological tradition, introduced via the translation of Damascene?s Dialectic, there also was, under the influence of the Corpus Areopagiticum and ascetic literature, notably of John Climacus? Ladder, another strain of thought originating from Christian Platonism. Damascene?s philosophical chapters, or Dialectic, translated into medieval Serbian in the third quarter of the fourteenth century, not only shows the high standards of translation technique developed in Serbian monastic scriptoria, but testifies to a highly educated readership interested in such a complex theologico-philosophical text with its nuanced terminology. A new theological debate about the impossibility of knowing God led to Gregory Palamas? complex text, The Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. Philosophical texts were frequently copied and much worked on in medieval Serbia, but it is difficult to infer about the actual scope of their influence on the formation and articulation of the worldview of medieval society. As a result of their demanding theoretical complexity, the study of philosophy was restricted to quite narrow monastic, court and urban circles. However, the strongest aspect of the influence of Byzantine thought on medieval society was the liturgy as the central social event of the community. It was through the liturgy that the wording of the translated texts influenced the life of medieval Serbian society.

On Texts and Countertexts

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Harry Berger
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Change ◽  
Da Vinci ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Robert Frost ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Stage ◽  
The Faerie Queene

The publication of Resisting Allegory offers us another chance to take stock of Harry Berger’s body of work. Harry Berger, Jr., has published original and enduringly influential essays on Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell, Milton, Plato, Alberti, Virgil, Dante, Da Vinci, Pico della Mirandola, Vermeer, Beowulf, Erasmus, More, Theocritus, the concept of cultural change, the theory of periodization, and the poetry of Robert Frost. The third stage in Berger’s career-long engagement with Spenser was a series of seven essays published between 1991 and 2005 that revisit Books 1–3 of The Faerie Queene. Three essays on Book 1 have been revised and incorporated into the first chapter of Resisting Allegory, which now offers a full-dress reading of the Legend of Holinesse. Four more essays, two each on Books 2 and 3 of the poem, are reprinted here.

their own natural seats laid to the view, that we seem by many readers today as humanly constructed, its not to hear of them, but clearly to see through them’ reconstruction in the poem is where we meet. (Defence of Poetry 86). In other words, we do not In his Discourse on Civil Life (1606), Lodowick see beyond, or outside, the virtues to something else Bryskett writes that Spenser is known to be very but rather through them as lenses. Only by so seeing well read in philosophy, both moral and natural, and through them may we share Spenser’s vision of that he intends to appeal to him to learn what moral human life from his moral perspective. It follows that philosophy is, ‘what be the parts thereof, whereby finally nothing outside the poem is needed to under-vertues are to be distinguished from vices’ (21). stand it, except (for us) the shared primary culture of Spenser rightly terms his poem ‘this present treatise’ its first audience. (I adapt the term ‘primary culture’ (in the current sense of the term) for his task is ‘True from the account by N. Frye 1990b:22–23 of ‘pri-vertue to aduance’ (V iii 3.8–9). One chief problem mary mythology’ or ‘primary concerns’ in contrast to is to separate virtue from vice, for what used to be ‘secondary concerns’, such as ideology.) called virtue ‘Is now cald vice; and that which vice To gain ‘an exact knowledge of the virtues’ was hight, | Is now hight vertue, and so vs’d of all’ (V needed to write The Faerie Queene, Spenser calls proem 4.2–3). Raleigh makes the same point in the upon the muses to reveal to him ‘the sacred noursery History of the World 1614:2.6.7: ‘some vertues | Of vertue’ (VI proem 3.1–2). Since he goes on to and some vices are so nicely distinguished, and so claim that the nursery was first planted on earth by resembling each other, as they are often confounded, the Gods ‘being deriu’d at furst | From heauenly and the one taken for the other’; and he praises The seedes of bounty soueraine’, for him the virtues exist Faerie Queene because Spenser has ‘formed right true transcendentally. As this nursery provides what vertues face herein’ (CV 2.3). The problem is noted Sidney calls ‘that idea or fore-conceit’ by which the in the opening cantos of the poem: in the argument poet’s skill is to be judged rather than by the poem to canto i, the Red Cross Knight is called ‘The itself, his effort as a poet is to plant its garden of Patrone of true Holinesse’, but he is so named only virtue in the minds of his readers so that they may after Archimago assumes his disguise. Then readers share his state of being ‘rauisht with rare thoughts are told – in fact, they are admonished – that ‘Saint delight’. Since ‘vertues seat is deepe within the mynd’, George himselfe ye would haue deemed him to be’ (ii however, he does not so much plant the virtues in 11.9), as even Una does. them as nurture what is already there. Today Spenser’s purpose may seem ideologically To spell out this point using the familiar Platonic innocuous but in his day those who called virtue vice, doctrine of anamnesis: while Spenser needed an exact and vice virtue, may well have regarded the poem knowledge of the virtues in order to write his poem, as subversive. But who were they? Most likely, the his readers need only to be reminded of what they pillars of society, such as Burghley (see IV proem already know (even today) but have largely forgotten 1.1–2n), theologians, such as John King who, in (especially today). What he finds deep within the 1597, complained that ‘instead of the writings of minds of his readers may be identified with the Moses and the prophets . . . now we have Arcadia, primary culture upon which his poem draws. It led and the Faëry Queene’ (cited Garrett 1996:139), him to use allegory, which, as Tuve cited by Roche and those religiously-minded for whom holiness 1964:30 explains, ‘is a method of reading in which meant professing correct doctrine; temperance we are made to think about things we already know’; meant life in a moral strait-jacket; chastity meant the and to use proverbs extensively, as Cincotta 1983 rejection of sexual love; friendship meant patriarchal explains, as a means to give authority to his poem. family ties; justice meant the justification of present Being primary, this culture is basic: simply expressed, authority; and courtesy meant the conduct of it is what we all know as human beings regardless of Elizabeth’s courtiers – in sum, those for whom virtue gender, race, religion, and class. It is what we just meant remaining subject to external law rather living know and have always known to be fair, right, and in the freedom of the gospel. just, both in our awareness of who we are and also Although generally Spenser overtly endorses the our relation to society and to some higher reality claims of noble blood, his poem values individual outside ourselves, both what it is and what it ought worth over social rank by ranking middle-class nur-

2014 ◽  
pp. 29-29
Keyword(s):  
Primary Culture ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Social Rank ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Family Ties ◽  
Moral Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

knights, one expects this knight to be clad ‘in poem more broadly to its own culture and especially mightie armes and siluer shielde’, and would be only to ours. While its excesses have been challenged, for momentarily puzzled on learning that he is wearing example by Stewart 1997:52–89, as the pendulum second-hand armour. The simple pleasure of reading continues to swing, soon one may expect a consolid-a story, as it were for its own sake, is interrupted and ated interest in the poem as both a cultural and a complicated only when we are told that he bears ‘a literary artefact shaped by the intervening centuries, bloodie Crosse’ on his breast as ‘The deare remem-and shaping our perception of them. brance of his dying Lord’. The ‘bloodie Crosse’ These critical movements considered only incid-names him the Red Cross Knight, and, for its first entally Spenser’s declared intention in writing his readers, involves his story in the complexities of poem, even though he announces it on the title-Renaissance religion, one minor example being the page: ‘THE FAERIE QUEENE. Disposed into twelue controversy over the use of commemorative icons, books, Fashioning XII. Morall vertues’, and at the end such as the proclamation by the Lord Deputy in of the 1590 edition declares in the Letter to Raleigh Ireland in 1579 that every horseman wear a red cross that ‘the generall end . . . of all the booke is to fash-on his breast and another on his back. (See R. Smith ion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and 1955:673.) Another such complexity is the knight’s gentle discipline’ (7–8). He adds that his means of identity: after he slays the dragon, the poem’s doing so is ‘to pourtraict in Arthure, before he was earliest annotator, John Dixon, names him ‘Christe’. king, the image of a braue knight, perfected in the As meanings and associations multiply, the poem is twelue priuate morall vertues, as Aristotle hath exposed to what Spenser most feared and needed deuised’ (18–19). This led earlier historical scholars to control, ‘the daunger of enuy, and suspition of to examine almost exhaustively how the virtues were present time’ (LR12). For its early reception, see defined in the classical and Christian centuries, for Cummings 1971. they assumed that Spenser inherited a tradition of the virtues that flowed from its source in Aristotle’s Criticism

2014 ◽  
pp. 24-24
Keyword(s):  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
The Faerie Queene
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