Edmund Spenser’s View of Christendom: New Legal and Theological Contexts for A View of the Present State of Ireland

Abstract

This paper considers how Spenser’s conception of conscience and universal law and justice in A View of the Present State of Ireland can be understood within the context of jurist Christopher St. German’s early sixteenth-century tract on equity and the common law and his subsequent tracts on the reformation of Church corruption. The paper attempts to re-situate Spenser’s engagement with legal and political theory within the context of English legal education as it had developed throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Ultimately, it shows that Spenser’s engagement with law, theology and politics reflected a commitment to a new Protestant conception of transnational Christendom as well as a re-conception of England as a Protestant nation within that transnational entity.