much more needs to be done before we may begin and are summed up in Book VI, with its climactic to grasp the ‘goodly golden chayne, wherewith yfere vision of the Graces’. Clearly the poem was meant to | The vertues linked are in louely wize’ (I ix 1.1–2). be read as a verse in the Bible was read in Spenser’s For example, in displaying the special powers of a day: any stanza is the centre from which to recon-virtue, each book displays also its radical limitations struct the whole. without the other virtues, and, above all, without A study of the virtues makes it increasingly clear divine grace. No book is complete in itself, for each that before ever Spenser began to write he had seen (after the first) critiques those that preceded it, so at least the outline of each virtue and had mapped that understanding what has been read constantly out their relationships. (On the formal idea of each expands and consolidates until by the end all the virtue, which his narrative unfolds and realizes, see virtues are seen in their unifying relationships. Heninger 1991:147.) Early in his career, he dedicated A general survey of all the books of The Faerie his talents to fashion the scheme of virtues in a poem Queene is offered in a number of introductions to the he could never expect to complete, no more than poem: Spens 1934, Nelson 1963, R. Freeman 1970, could Chaucer in projecting the Canterbury Tales – Heale 1987, Tonkin 1989, Meyer 1991, Waller 1994, on its unfinished state, see Rajan 1985:44–84, and and Oram 1997. Tonkin and Oram especially offer Hamilton 1990 – and he never faltered or changed. close and perceptive readings of each book. In addi-What he says about the Red Cross Knight may be tion, there are studies of individual books. Book applied to him: ‘The noble hart, that harbours ver-I: Rose 1975; II: Berger 1957; III and IV: Roche tuous thought [i.e. knowledge of the virtues], | And 1964, Silberman 1995; IV: Goldberg 1981; III, IV, is with childe of glorious great intent, | Can neuer and V: Broaddus 1995; V: Dunseath 1968, Aptekar rest, vntill it forth haue brought | Th’eternall brood 1969, Fletcher 1971; VI: A. Williams 1967, Tonkin of glorie excellent’ (I v1.1–4). As he testifies in the 1972. See also the entry on each book in The Spenser final canto of the 1596 poem: as a ship may be Encyclopedia. In addition, there are general studies delayed by storms on its way to a certain shore, of the virtues: for example, Horton 1978 finds the ‘Right so it fares with me in this long way, | Whose poem’s unity in the binary pairing of the books (see course is often stayd, yet neuer is astray’ (VI xii also his entry, ‘virtues’, in the SEnc), and M.F.N. 1.8–9). While we may speculate that Spenser wrote Dixon 1996:13 argues that Spenser offers ‘a gram-for patronage, a pension, or a position at court, we mar of virtues’, i.e. ‘an iterative series of interde-know from the opening stanza of The Faerie Queene pendent virtues’. There are also many studies of the that ‘the sacred Muse’ commanded him ‘To blazon techniques used by Spenser to structure the virtues: broade emongst her learned throng’. Clearly he had for example, the ‘resonances sounding at large no choice but to devote his life to writing that poem. throughout the poem’ examined by Lewis 1967, the The third step in relating the virtues is to recog-structural triads by A. Fowler 1973, the poem’s nize that they are fashioned in the poem through the analogical coherence by Nohrnberg 1976, its self-actions of the major characters in order to fashion reflexiveness by MacCaffrey 1976, the ‘echoing’ by readers in ‘vertuous and gentle discipline’. In the Hollander 1981, the demonic parody of the virtues Letter to Raleigh, Spenser distinguishes between his by N. Frye 1963 and Fletcher 1971, the poem’s am-‘general intention and meaning’, which is to fashion bivalence by Fletcher 1964, the structural patterns in the virtues, and his poem’s ‘generall end’, which is Books I and II by Røstvig 1994, the symmetrical to ‘fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous ring structure in Book III by Greenfield 1989, the and gentle discipline’ (8). Accordingly, our under-poem’s broken symmetries by Kane 1990, the use of standing of the nature of holiness, for example, is gained image-patterns in which images are repeated in bono only by reading the story of the Red Cross Knight, et in malo by Kaske 1999, the sequence of emblems and not by bringing to it anything more than a which make the poem ‘the most emblematic long general awareness that the virtue relates our life in poem in our literature’ (A. Fowler 1999:23), and this world to God. His quest traces the process of the narrative’s self-reflectiveness by Goldberg 1981. sanctification as his will cooperates with divine grace; The poem interprets and reinterprets itself endlessly, and, through him, we learn how to frame our lives in as Tonkin 1989:43 suggests in commenting on holy living. The virtues do not exist apart from the

2014 ◽  
pp. 28-28
Keyword(s):  
Ring Structure ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
Broken Symmetries ◽  
Divine Grace ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Canterbury Tales ◽  
General Studies ◽  
The Faerie Queene

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

clash between the beauty-loving Renaissance and the he [Spenser] was quickly swept overboard because of moral Reformation. In the light of the medieval reli-his inability to write like Donne, Eliot, and Allen gious tradition examined by Tuve, Guyon destroys Tate’ (1968:2). His extended interpretation of Book the Bower because he ‘looks at the kind of complete II, The Allegorical Temper (1957), followed by essays seduction which means the final death of the soul’ on the other books, traces the changing psycholo-(31). gical or psychic development of the poem’s major If the New Critics of the 1930s to the early 1950s characters by ‘reading the poem as a poem’ (9) rather had been interested in Spenser (few were), they than as a historical document. My own book, The would not have considered his intention in writing Structure of Allegory in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (1961a), The Faerie Queene because that topic had been dis-which I regard now as the work of a historical critic missed as a fallacy. For Wimsatt and Beardsley partly rehabilitated by myth and archetypal criticism, 1954:5 (first proclaimed in 1946), ‘The poem is not examines the poem’s structure through its patterns the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached of imagery, an interest shared with Alastair Fowler, from the author at birth and goes about the world Spenser and the Numbers of Time (1964), and by beyond his power to intend about it or control it)’. Kathleen Williams, Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’: The So much for any poet’s intention, conscious or World of Glass (1966). unconscious, realized or not. Not that it would have In any history of modern Spenser criticism – for a mattered much, for the arbiter of taste at that time, general account, see Hadfield 1996b – Berger may T.S. Eliot, had asked rhetorically: ‘who, except schol-serve as a key transitional figure. In a retrospective ars, and except the eccentric few who are born with glance at his essays on Spenser written from 1958 to a sympathy for such work, or others who have delib-1987, he acknowledges that ‘I still consider myself erately studied themselves into the right apprecia-a New Critic, even an old-fashioned one’ who tion, can now read through the whole of The Faerie has been ‘reconstructed’ by New Historicism Queene with delight?’ (1932:443). In Two Letters, (1989:208). In Berger 1988:453–56, he offers a per-Spenser acknowledges that the gods had given him sonal account of his change, admitting that as a New the gift to delight but never to be useful (Dii mihi, Critic he had been interested ‘in exploring complex dulce diu dederant: verùm vtile numquam), though representations of ethico-psychological patterns’ he wishes they had; and, in the Letter to Raleigh, he apart from ‘the institutional structures and discourses recognizes that the general end of his poem could be that give them historical specificity’. Even so, he had achieved only through fiction, which ‘the most part allowed that earlier historical study, which had been of men delight to read, rather for variety of matter, concerned with ‘historical specificity’, was ‘solid and then for profite of the ensample’ (10). As a conse-important’. For the New Historicist Louis Adrian quence, he addresses his readers not by teaching them Montrose, however, earlier historical scholarship didactically but rather through delight. It follows that ‘merely impoverished the text’ (Berger 1988:8), and if his poem does not delight, it remains a closed book. he is almost as harsh towards Berger himself, com-Several critics who first flourished in the 1950s and plaining that his writings ‘have tended to avoid direct 1960s responded initially to Spenser’s words and confrontations of sociopolitical issues’, though he imagery rather than to his ideas, thought, or histor-blames ‘the absence of a historically specific socio-ical context. One is Donald Cheney, who, in Spenser’s political dimension’ on the time they were written – Image of Nature (1966), read The Faerie Queene a time when ‘the sociopolitical study of Spenser was ‘under the intensive scrutiny which has been applied epitomized by the pursuit of topical identifications or in recent decades to metaphysical lyrics’, seeking the cataloguing of commonplaces’ (7). In contrast, out ‘ironic, discordant impulses’, ‘rapidly shifting the New Historicism, of which he is the most elo-allusions’, and the poet’s ‘constant insistence upon quent theorist, sees a work embedded – i.e. intrins-the ambiguity of his images’ (7, 17, 20). Another is ically, inextricably fixed – not in history generally, Paul Alpers, whose The Poetry of ‘The Faerie Queene’ and certainly not in ‘cosmic politics’ that Thomas (1967) demonstrated that individual stanzas of the Greene 1963:406 claims to be the concern of all epics, poem may be subjected to very intense scrutiny. A but in a historically specific sociopolitical context. third, the most influential of all, is Harry Berger, Jr, (For further comments on their clash, see Hamilton

2014 ◽  
pp. 25-25
Keyword(s):  
Faerie Queene ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
The Gift ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Specificity ◽  
Death Of The Soul ◽  
New Critics ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Bunyan and Spenser

PMLA ◽  
1930 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 216-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold Golder
Keyword(s):  
Tree Of Life ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
John Bunyan ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
House Beautiful ◽  
The Faerie Queene

That John Bunyan had read at least the first book of Spenser's Faerie Queene, and had transformed certain adventures of the Red Cross Knight into the adventures of his own hero in Pilgrim's Progress, is a statement which has been frequently made. And, indeed, the idea has much reason on its side. The parallel between a series of incidents in Spenser's first book and a series in Pilgrim's Progress is fully as close as many another which has been held sufficient to establish a literary relationship. To Spenser's House of Holinesse, with its porter, its four grave damsels, its sober entertainment of the knight, corresponds Bunyan's House Beautiful. To the closing episode of the Red Cross Knight's sojourn at the House of Holinesse, his sight of the pilgrim's road and of Hierusalem from the near-by Mount of Contemplation, corresponds the view which Christian, from the top of the House Beautiful, has of the Delectable Mountains, from which, in the course of the story, he is to see the Celestial City itself. To the immediately succeeding conflict with the dragon, to the monster's fiery breath and horrid shrieks, to the hero's distress and eventual triumph, and particularly to the miraculous restoration of the wounded knight through the agency of the Tree of Life, corresponds Christian's battle with Apollyon, fought in the Valley of Humiliation, just after he has parted from the damsels of the House Beautiful. When to the parallel between these series of incidents in The Faerie Queene and in Pilgrim's Progress is added a certain similarity between the allegorical significances of these incidents, as well as a much more doubtful likeness between Spenser's Despair and the Giant Despair of Bunyan, some sort of relationship between the earlier and the later author appears evident enough.

Mutability and Mortality in The Faerie Queene

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith H. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Staged Construction ◽  
The Cantos ◽  
Death Of The Soul ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos engage the subjects of sin and death from start to finish—from the introduction of Mutability herself through the end of her pageant—but Spenser’s Mutability is neither a simple mirror of the Fall nor a metonymic encoding of it. The Cantos open with a staged construction of Mutabilility’s figure, and her story draws on numerous renderings of change, including the Bible, Ovid, Lucretius, and Boethius, without merely repeating any one. Related passages on sin and death in The Faerie Queene, books I and II, have particularly relevant, significant ties to the subjects of time and mortality in the Cantos, as well as to questions of narrative and figuration. Mutability’s pageant explicitly engages with mortalism, the death of the soul, or the individual soul, along with the body, a concern that makes sense as an offshoot of Spenser’s engagement with materialism elsewhere in his epic. (This is another preview of Milton as well.)

Allegorical reading in occasional Elizabethan liturgies

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Christian
Keyword(s):  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Public Figures ◽  
Religious Services ◽  
Current Events ◽  
Bad Weather ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
The Church

Occasional liturgies are scripts for religious services which respond to specific occasions: emergencies like plague (in 1563), Muslim invasions in Europe (in 1565 and 1566), bad weather (in 1571), the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the London earthquake of 1580, the Spanish invasion (expected from 1586 through 1588), or plots against the queen like Dr. Parry’s in 1585 and Babington’s in 1586. Two occasional liturgies from 1576 and 1585 offer readings and prayers for November 17, signalling that, like Pentecost and Christmas, Accession Day was part of the church year. Identifying England with Israel, liturgists treated Elizabethan current events and public figures as interchangeable with events and characters described in the Bible. Elizabethan churchgoers thus had abundant training in decoding allegorical narratives—a facility they could bring to a reading of The Faerie Queene.

The Faerie Queene

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

Chow Rings, Decomposition of the Diagonal, and the Topology of Families (AM-187)

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Voisin
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Chow Groups ◽  
Ring Structure ◽  
Complete Intersections ◽  
Algebraic Varieties ◽  
Chow Ring ◽  
Hodge Structures ◽  
Chow Rings ◽  
Geometric Methods ◽  
The Right

This book provides an introduction to algebraic cycles on complex algebraic varieties, to the major conjectures relating them to cohomology, and even more precisely to Hodge structures on cohomology. The book is intended for both students and researchers, and not only presents a survey of the geometric methods developed in the last thirty years to understand the famous Bloch-Beilinson conjectures, but also examines recent work by the author. It focuses on two central objects: the diagonal of a variety—and the partial Bloch-Srinivas type decompositions it may have depending on the size of Chow groups—as well as its small diagonal, which is the right object to consider in order to understand the ring structure on Chow groups and cohomology. An exploration of a sampling of recent works by the author looks at the relation, conjectured in general by Bloch and Beilinson, between the coniveau of general complete intersections and their Chow groups and a very particular property satisfied by the Chow ring of K3 surfaces and conjecturally by hyper-Kähler manifolds. In particular, the book delves into arguments originating in Nori's work that have been further developed by others.

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.

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