“The Falsest Twoo”

2020 ◽  
pp. 26-49
Author(s):  
Catherine Nicholson
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Authorial Intent ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Poetic Composition

This chapter discusses the question of how to represent the orthography of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene in modern texts. Editions of Spenser's poem nearly always preserve the late sixteenth-century spellings: it is The Faerie Queene, not The Fairy Queen. The reproduction of old spellings communicates a set of seemingly irreproachable editorial commitments: to textual fidelity, to philological precision, to the material and cultural contexts of poetic composition, and, above all, to authorial intent. Ironically, however, the effects of old spelling on Spenser's modern readers are hard to justify in such terms. The chapter argues that although the “old-spelling” Faerie Queene encodes much less of Spenser's meaning than most modern editions of the poem imply, it retains more of what the poem has meant to readers, and to the tradition of literary scholarship.

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.

Henry viii and the “Bewhoring” of the Petrarchan Beloved in Sixteenth-Century English Literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-16
Author(s):  
Susan Dunn-Hensley
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Sacred Feminine ◽  
Male Control ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Female Power

This article examines the ways in which changes in Marian theology and the defaming and execution of two of Henry viii’s queens affected early modern literary representations of female power. It argues that, through the translations of Thomas Wyatt, Petrarchan poetry entered into a world of state-sponsored iconoclasm, a world where images of the sacred feminine, once revered, could be destroyed, and queens, once exalted as beloveds, could quickly be reduced to “whores” and executed. The first part of the article considers Wyatt’s “Whoso list to hunt,” a translation of Petrarch’s “Rime 190,” as a lens for examining the female body as both object of desire and site of violent destruction. The second part of the article considers English Petrarchism late in the reign of Elizabeth i, examining how John Donne’s “Love’s Progress” and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (Book ii) construct violent fantasies of male control over the powerful female.

Remembering the Death of Turnus: Spenser'sFaerie Queeneand the Ending of theAeneid*

2011 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 430-471
Author(s):  
Lars-Håkan Svensson
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Faerie Queene

AbstractMost of the key episodes in book 1 of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590) replay famous passages in Virgil's Aeneid. However, the concluding canto, describing the Redcrosse knight's betrothal to Una, is based on Maffeo Vegio's fifteenth-century Supplementum to the Aeneid, while, surprisingly, the Aeneid's much-disputed ending appears in triplicate in early sections of book 1. This article examines the place and function of book 1’s three imitations of the Aeneid's ending, while also relating them to Spenser's appropriations of the ending in later books of The Faerie Queene. It argues that, in making Redcrosse assume the position of Aeneas in largely negative contexts, book 1 opposes standard sixteenth-century interpretations of Aeneas's pietas, whereas later books of The Faerie Queene usually conform to prevalent early modern interpretations of the moral import of this powerful cultural memory.

scholarly journals Abridging the Antiquitee of Faery lond: New Paths Through Old Matter in The Faerie Queene*

2005 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 857-880 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wheatley Chloe
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
Ready Access ◽  
The Faerie Queene

AbstractSixteenth-century history may have been recorded most spectacularly in prestigious folio chronicles, but readers had more ready access to printed books that conveyed this history in epitome. This essay focuses on how Edmund Spenser (1552?– 99) appropriated the rhetoric and form of such printed redactions in his rendition of fairy history found in book 2 of The Faerie Queene (1596). Through his abridged fairy chronicle, Spenser connects to a broadly defined reading public, emphasizes the deeds not only of kings but their imperial and civic deputies, and provides an alternative interpretive pathway through his poem.

The Optics of Prediction in The Faerie Queene: Merlin’s Reflecting Telescope

2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-28
Author(s):  
Kyle Pivetti
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Crystal Ball ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Scientific Advances

A mirror or a crystal ball? That interpretive crux arises at the heart of Book iii of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene – when Britomart discovers Merlin’s “glassy globe” and first sees Arthegall in its surface. The “looking-glasse,” that is, not only reflects Britomart but also tells the future. This essay revisits the problem of Merlin’s glass by locating it in the context of rapidly developing sixteenth-century optics, and one invention in particular: the reflecting telescope. By 1590, a range of thinkers from John Dee to Leonard Digges discovered in the reflective properties of mirrors innovative ways to understand human sight, cognition, and prediction. And it is Digges that proposes a reflecting telescope, a device that Merlin employs in Book iii. These scientific advances, in turn, inform Spenser’s references to vision and reflection throughout the poem, granting his allegory the ability both to distort sight and counter-intuitively to produce the future. Indeed, The Faerie Queene uses misrepresentation to protect its queen and to protect budding projects of nationalism. To see, for Spenser, is to change “the world it self” and to bring about its British futures.

The Left Hand of God: Despair in Medieval and Renaissance Tradition

1965 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 18-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Snyder
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Renaissance Literature ◽  
Prodigal Son ◽  
Left Hand ◽  
Traditional Morality ◽  
Renaissance Epic ◽  
The Faerie Queene

A man of hell, that cals himselfe Despaire(Faerie Queene, I, ix, 28)Penser's moving description of the Redcrosse Knight's encounter with Despaire in Book One of The Faerie Queene is the culmination of a long and rich movement of thought and imagery. Here, as so often in his great Renaissance epic, Spenser looks back to the middle ages, drawing on a still-vital tradition to present the ugly, sinister figure with its knives and ropes and its soulpiercing arguments.In spite of the tides of secularism, despair in its theological sense—loss of hope of salvation—figures significantly in Renaissance literature. Examining England alone, one notes its place in the traditional morality play pattern as the turning point of the hero's downward movement: Skelton's Magnyfycence is a prominent example. Despair episodes have a somewhat similar place in the prodigal son dramas which were popular during the middle decades of the sixteenth century, such plays as Lusty Juventus, Misogonus, and Nice Wanton.

Spenser, Plowden, and the Hypallactic Instrument

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Zurcher
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
Psychological States ◽  
Good Works ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Since at least the work of Jones and Stallybrass on Renaissance clothing, the materially distributed nature of human identity—not merely reflected in, but constituted by, garments and other prosthetic objects—has been marked as a recurrent and distinctive feature of early modern English literary accounts of person. This article explores hybrid objects in two works by Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) and A view of the Present State of Ireland (c.1596), charting connections between Spenser’s hypallactic allegoresis and early modern common law evidentiary conventions. Spenser’s mingling of inward, psychological states (purpose, inclination, guilt, etc.) with material objects pushes against sixteenth-century protestant rejections of embodied ritual, popish vestments, devotional icons and shrines, and good works, but emerges as a powerful instrument in his proposals for social and legal ‘reform’ of Ireland.

The Faerie Queene

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

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.

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