“O pierlesse Poesye, where is then thy place?”: As Piers’s despairing question indicates, Spenser’s concern with patronage stretches beyond the customary “topoi” of his paratexts to inform the topography of the verse through which he seeks it. As he proceeds from genre to genre, the geographical dislocation of his speakers figures the cultural displacement of his craft. In terms of the authorial careers he lived and fabricated—the distinct yet inextricably related careers of Edmund Spenser and Colin Clout—“place” is of crucial thematic significance to “authority,” whether it be Leicester House, Kilcolman Castle, Essex House, Mount Acidale, or the “courts” of Cynthia and Mercilla (and it is arguable whether the former three are any less fictive than the latter). Beginning with an analysis of the “place” of poetry in the pastoral landscape of The Shepheardes Calender, this article examines its various inflections through the genera that followed. Relegated to the allegedly “salvage” terrain of the Gaelic bards, Spenser creates landscapes that both attest to, and simultaneously resist, his fear of cultural assimilation. But the wish to live in fairyland, expressed in the proem to the sixth book of The Faerie Queene, concedes poetry’s inability to fashion a patronal culture worthy of heroic verse, and necessitates the adoption of an Ovidian poetics paradoxically centered on the displaced self and the “designer” wilderness it inhabits.
{"title":"“O pierlesse Poesye, where is then thy place?”: Locating Patronage in Spenser","authors":"Richard A. Mccabe","doi":"10.1086/694435","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/694435","url":null,"abstract":"“O pierlesse Poesye, where is then thy place?”: As Piers’s despairing question indicates, Spenser’s concern with patronage stretches beyond the customary “topoi” of his paratexts to inform the topography of the verse through which he seeks it. As he proceeds from genre to genre, the geographical dislocation of his speakers figures the cultural displacement of his craft. In terms of the authorial careers he lived and fabricated—the distinct yet inextricably related careers of Edmund Spenser and Colin Clout—“place” is of crucial thematic significance to “authority,” whether it be Leicester House, Kilcolman Castle, Essex House, Mount Acidale, or the “courts” of Cynthia and Mercilla (and it is arguable whether the former three are any less fictive than the latter). Beginning with an analysis of the “place” of poetry in the pastoral landscape of The Shepheardes Calender, this article examines its various inflections through the genera that followed. Relegated to the allegedly “salvage” terrain of the Gaelic bards, Spenser creates landscapes that both attest to, and simultaneously resist, his fear of cultural assimilation. But the wish to live in fairyland, expressed in the proem to the sixth book of The Faerie Queene, concedes poetry’s inability to fashion a patronal culture worthy of heroic verse, and necessitates the adoption of an Ovidian poetics paradoxically centered on the displaced self and the “designer” wilderness it inhabits.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74377864","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Originally a plenary lecture given at the 2015 Spenser Conference in Dublin on “Spenser’s Places/The Place of Spenser,” this article explores the place of Spenser in the pastoral tradition, encompassing as it does Virgil, the Bible, and also the various other versions of pastoral that had emerged over the course of the Middle Ages. Spenser constantly sets these rich strands of inheritance in dialectical opposition to each other, principally in the Shepheardes Calender but also in the Faerie Queene; and he associates these different traditions with different kinds of places, of landscapes, which set up their own kinds of dialectic.
{"title":"Spenser’s Pastoral Places","authors":"H. Cooper","doi":"10.1086/694438","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/694438","url":null,"abstract":"Originally a plenary lecture given at the 2015 Spenser Conference in Dublin on “Spenser’s Places/The Place of Spenser,” this article explores the place of Spenser in the pastoral tradition, encompassing as it does Virgil, the Bible, and also the various other versions of pastoral that had emerged over the course of the Middle Ages. Spenser constantly sets these rich strands of inheritance in dialectical opposition to each other, principally in the Shepheardes Calender but also in the Faerie Queene; and he associates these different traditions with different kinds of places, of landscapes, which set up their own kinds of dialectic.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84805797","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay asserts that “temperance” for Spenser is not an imagined state of self-sameness that must be learned by Guyon at the end of Book II of the Faerie Queene. Rather, Spenser dubs Guyon the “Knight of Temperance” because he tempers the overmoist, luxuriant Bower through an action he accomplishes rather than a trait he embodies. The Bower of Bliss was designed to alter the knights’ humoral complexions through their exchange with this garden, a garden that has more influence on the knights than the temptress Acrasia. To break the Bower’s force, Guyon moderates the improperly-mixed Bower by destroying the Italianate garden features and burning the Bower, a common early modern remedy for land that was too moist. Through this allegory on temperance, Spenser warns the English against over-cultivating their gardens and lands, lest the English also become over-refined like the Italians and French.
{"title":"Tempering the Intemperate in Spenser’s Bower of Bliss","authors":"Angela D. Bullard","doi":"10.1086/695575","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/695575","url":null,"abstract":"This essay asserts that “temperance” for Spenser is not an imagined state of self-sameness that must be learned by Guyon at the end of Book II of the Faerie Queene. Rather, Spenser dubs Guyon the “Knight of Temperance” because he tempers the overmoist, luxuriant Bower through an action he accomplishes rather than a trait he embodies. The Bower of Bliss was designed to alter the knights’ humoral complexions through their exchange with this garden, a garden that has more influence on the knights than the temptress Acrasia. To break the Bower’s force, Guyon moderates the improperly-mixed Bower by destroying the Italianate garden features and burning the Bower, a common early modern remedy for land that was too moist. Through this allegory on temperance, Spenser warns the English against over-cultivating their gardens and lands, lest the English also become over-refined like the Italians and French.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82157129","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article analyzes significant traces of the View of the Present State of Ireland in Irish novels published in the aftermath of the Act of Union of 1800. Written by Protestants, they aimed to explain the Irish problem to an English audience, and thereby foster more harmonious relations between the two islands. Spenser’s View, which had long been a resource for antiquaries, was taken up by these novelists in a variety of ways, ranging from plundering his hostile descriptions of Gaelic Irish mores to add color and an alleged authenticity to their characters and plots, to engaging with his politics and pointing to his complicity in the colonial project in Ireland. That some novelists employed both of these approaches simultaneously shows not only the continuing Protestant ambivalence toward the Gaelic Irish, and particularly the still-threatening peasantry, but also the centrality of Spenser’s View to fictive depictions of early nineteenth-century Ireland.
{"title":"From Antiquarian Text to Fiction’s Subtext: The Extended Afterlife of Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland","authors":"Clare O’halloran","doi":"10.1086/694441","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/694441","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes significant traces of the View of the Present State of Ireland in Irish novels published in the aftermath of the Act of Union of 1800. Written by Protestants, they aimed to explain the Irish problem to an English audience, and thereby foster more harmonious relations between the two islands. Spenser’s View, which had long been a resource for antiquaries, was taken up by these novelists in a variety of ways, ranging from plundering his hostile descriptions of Gaelic Irish mores to add color and an alleged authenticity to their characters and plots, to engaging with his politics and pointing to his complicity in the colonial project in Ireland. That some novelists employed both of these approaches simultaneously shows not only the continuing Protestant ambivalence toward the Gaelic Irish, and particularly the still-threatening peasantry, but also the centrality of Spenser’s View to fictive depictions of early nineteenth-century Ireland.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89663367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores the places of Florimell and the place of simile in The Faerie Queene, with particular focus on the third book “Of Chastity.” Whereas the main narrative critically presents chaste/chased Florimell’s indiscriminate flight from all men, a series of epic similes, with extended narratives about alternate places, locate the logic of her motivation to flee and enlarge our understanding of Florimell and of chastity. Although simile and metaphor recently have been characterized as figures that contain the transformations they perform, The Faerie Queene suggests that the narrative transformations within an epic simile are not always cordoned off by the figure’s formal structure and can stake a place in the poem at large.
{"title":"Transporting Florimell: The Place of Simile in Book III of The Faerie Queene","authors":"Mary Fahey","doi":"10.1086/694444","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/694444","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the places of Florimell and the place of simile in The Faerie Queene, with particular focus on the third book “Of Chastity.” Whereas the main narrative critically presents chaste/chased Florimell’s indiscriminate flight from all men, a series of epic similes, with extended narratives about alternate places, locate the logic of her motivation to flee and enlarge our understanding of Florimell and of chastity. Although simile and metaphor recently have been characterized as figures that contain the transformations they perform, The Faerie Queene suggests that the narrative transformations within an epic simile are not always cordoned off by the figure’s formal structure and can stake a place in the poem at large.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87317457","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The consensus of Spenser’s biographers is that Ireland never became his home. In this article, I question the assumptions that Spenser was banished to Ireland and that he viewed his years in Ireland as an exile. At critical junctures in Spenser’s life, 1579–80, 1582, 1588–91, and 1595–96, when he might have tried to make a career in England, he chose Ireland. I explore the reasons why Spenser decided to make his home in Ireland. In the process, I show that Ireland was less repressive than Whitgift’s England and argue that Ireland offered him independence from the uncertainties of the patronage system. In Ireland, Spenser could earn the means to support his family and to write the Faerie Queene.
{"title":"Spenser’s “Home”","authors":"J. Brink","doi":"10.1086/694437","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/694437","url":null,"abstract":"The consensus of Spenser’s biographers is that Ireland never became his home. In this article, I question the assumptions that Spenser was banished to Ireland and that he viewed his years in Ireland as an exile. At critical junctures in Spenser’s life, 1579–80, 1582, 1588–91, and 1595–96, when he might have tried to make a career in England, he chose Ireland. I explore the reasons why Spenser decided to make his home in Ireland. In the process, I show that Ireland was less repressive than Whitgift’s England and argue that Ireland offered him independence from the uncertainties of the patronage system. In Ireland, Spenser could earn the means to support his family and to write the Faerie Queene.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79365504","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article proposes three different tenor-vehicle relations for a three-phase metaphorics of the Christian mythos in late medieval and early modern literature. Dante, Spenser, and Milton are the chosen examples (with animadversion to Langland). The phases are equated with three phases of language in Vico’s New Science. The first phase is participative, mythic, “tautogorical,” and “hieroglyphic”; the second is analogical, typological, and figurative; and the third allusive, ironic, antiphrastic, and prosaic-discursive. Christ’s death and resurrection, for example, are liturgically-calendrically and participatively present to the pilgrim in the incarnational-reincarnational poetics and transfigurative metaphorics of the Commedia; they are analogical to—and allegorized somatically in—Redcrosse’s strength or weakness of faith in Faerie Queene I; and are referred to allusively and ironically in Adam’s coming to consciousness and revival to the presence of Eve in Paradise Lost. Similarly instanced and modally differentiated are the poets’ treatments of the harrowing of hell, the sacrament of the eucharist, the symbol of Jacob’s ladder, the sacred ground of religiously consecrated sites, despair of salvation, and the seven capital sins (e.g., cosmic grades of confessional descent and ascent in Dante, threats to faith’s allegorical health in Spenser, and the devils’ Renaissance virtues in Milton).
{"title":"Three Phases of Metaphor, and the Mythos of the Christian Religion: Dante, Spenser, Milton","authors":"James Nohrnberg","doi":"10.1086/694445","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/694445","url":null,"abstract":"This article proposes three different tenor-vehicle relations for a three-phase metaphorics of the Christian mythos in late medieval and early modern literature. Dante, Spenser, and Milton are the chosen examples (with animadversion to Langland). The phases are equated with three phases of language in Vico’s New Science. The first phase is participative, mythic, “tautogorical,” and “hieroglyphic”; the second is analogical, typological, and figurative; and the third allusive, ironic, antiphrastic, and prosaic-discursive. Christ’s death and resurrection, for example, are liturgically-calendrically and participatively present to the pilgrim in the incarnational-reincarnational poetics and transfigurative metaphorics of the Commedia; they are analogical to—and allegorized somatically in—Redcrosse’s strength or weakness of faith in Faerie Queene I; and are referred to allusively and ironically in Adam’s coming to consciousness and revival to the presence of Eve in Paradise Lost. Similarly instanced and modally differentiated are the poets’ treatments of the harrowing of hell, the sacrament of the eucharist, the symbol of Jacob’s ladder, the sacred ground of religiously consecrated sites, despair of salvation, and the seven capital sins (e.g., cosmic grades of confessional descent and ascent in Dante, threats to faith’s allegorical health in Spenser, and the devils’ Renaissance virtues in Milton).","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79782402","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Most references to classical literature in the View are brief and second-hand. A few classical works, however, have a relevance to the View whether Spenser was immediately consulting them or not, notably those having to do with the classical Roman experience of conquest and empire. Caesar’s De Bello Gallico is the obvious example; but there are previously unnoted connections between Spenser’s dialogue and Tacitus’s Agricola. Agricola narrates Rome’s pacification of Britain, and raises the prospect of Ireland’s being Rome’s logical next conquest. It is not, however, a narrative of imperial success, but Tacitus’s biography of his father-in-law, the governor who brought Rome to the point of subduing all of Britain, only to be recalled by Domitian. Tacitus’s protest against the emperor’s action parallels Spenser’s protest against the recall of Lord Grey, whom he similarly argues had been on the point of successfully completing his mission. Spenser’s criticism of high-level malfeasance in Elizabeth’s court is muted, nor does Spenser give voice to the kind of sarcastic skepticism about England’s imperial mission that Tacitus puts in the mouth of the resistance leader Calgacus. But the parallels can nevertheless be felt in surprising places.
《观点》中对古典文学的引用大多是简短的二手文献。然而，一些经典著作，无论斯宾塞是否直接参考了它们，都与这种观点有关，特别是那些与罗马征服和帝国经验有关的著作。凯撒的De Bello Gallico就是一个明显的例子;但斯宾塞的对话和塔西佗的《农业》之间存在着之前未被注意到的联系。阿格里科拉叙述了罗马对不列颠的平定，并提出了爱尔兰成为罗马下一个合乎逻辑的征服目标的前景。然而，它并不是帝国成功的叙述，而是塔西佗关于他岳父的传记，这位总督带领罗马征服了整个英国，结果却被多米提安召回。塔西佗对皇帝行为的抗议与斯宾塞对召回格雷勋爵的抗议如出一辙，他同样认为格雷勋爵即将成功完成他的使命。斯宾塞对伊丽莎白宫廷高层渎职行为的批评是沉默的，他也没有像塔西佗对抵抗运动领袖卡尔加库斯所说的那样，对英格兰帝国使命的讽刺怀疑。然而，这种相似之处在一些令人惊讶的地方也能感受到。
{"title":"The Classical Background of Spenser’s View","authors":"Gordon Braden","doi":"10.1086/694439","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/694439","url":null,"abstract":"Most references to classical literature in the View are brief and second-hand. A few classical works, however, have a relevance to the View whether Spenser was immediately consulting them or not, notably those having to do with the classical Roman experience of conquest and empire. Caesar’s De Bello Gallico is the obvious example; but there are previously unnoted connections between Spenser’s dialogue and Tacitus’s Agricola. Agricola narrates Rome’s pacification of Britain, and raises the prospect of Ireland’s being Rome’s logical next conquest. It is not, however, a narrative of imperial success, but Tacitus’s biography of his father-in-law, the governor who brought Rome to the point of subduing all of Britain, only to be recalled by Domitian. Tacitus’s protest against the emperor’s action parallels Spenser’s protest against the recall of Lord Grey, whom he similarly argues had been on the point of successfully completing his mission. Spenser’s criticism of high-level malfeasance in Elizabeth’s court is muted, nor does Spenser give voice to the kind of sarcastic skepticism about England’s imperial mission that Tacitus puts in the mouth of the resistance leader Calgacus. But the parallels can nevertheless be felt in surprising places.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90143483","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The first section of the View is widely understood to be influenced by the twelfth-century texts of Gerald of Wales, as transmitted by Richard Stanyhurst in his Plain and Perfect Description of Ireland included in Holinshed (1577). These works describe the Norman intervention in Ireland as a civilizing process. Such an identification of sources is problematic, however, because the ultimate purpose of the View was to discredit Stanyhurst’s argument that Irish-born descendants of the Norman conquerors of Ireland (the so-called “Old English”) should complete that task. This case of problematic sourcing is resolved given that Stanyhurst’s original text reappeared in the 1587 edition of Holinshed’s Chronicle accompanied by some translations from the writings of Gerald of Wales made by John Hooker (an English Protestant antiquarian), and also by Hooker’s own History of Ireland 1546–86, wherein Hooker attributes the disturbed condition of the country to the recalcitrance of Old English lords. This, for Hooker, and also for Spenser, proved that the Irish population of English descent was in greater need of reform than their Gaelic neighbors. Given that this was the novel argument of the View, and given close echoes between Hooker’s description of famine in Munster and similar passages in the View, Hooker’s contribution to the 1587 edition of Holinshed’s Chronicle is arguably the most potent influence on Spenser’s work.
人们普遍认为，《观点》的第一部分受到了12世纪《威尔士的杰拉尔德》(Gerald of Wales)文本的影响，如理查德·斯坦赫斯特(Richard Stanyhurst)在《霍林希德》(Holinshed, 1577)中对爱尔兰的《平原与完美描述》(Plain and Perfect Description of Ireland)中所述。这些作品将诺曼人对爱尔兰的干预描述为一个文明的过程。然而，这种来源的识别是有问题的，因为该观点的最终目的是质疑斯坦赫斯特的论点，即爱尔兰的诺曼征服者的爱尔兰出生的后裔(所谓的“古英语人”)应该完成这项任务。鉴于斯坦赫斯特的原始文本重新出现在1587年版的《霍林什德编年史》中，并伴随着约翰·胡克(一位英国新教古物学家)对威尔士杰拉尔德著作的一些翻译，以及胡克自己的《1546-86年爱尔兰史》，这个问题的来源得到了解决，胡克将这个国家的混乱状况归因于古英格兰领主的顽固。对胡克和斯宾塞来说，这证明了英国血统的爱尔兰人比他们的盖尔邻居更需要改革。考虑到这是《观点》的新颖论点，而且胡克对明斯特饥荒的描述与《观点》中的类似段落有着密切的呼应，胡克对1587年版霍林施德编年史的贡献可以说是对斯宾塞作品最有力的影响。
{"title":"Irish Sources for Spenser’s View","authors":"Nicholas P. Canny","doi":"10.1086/694440","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/694440","url":null,"abstract":"The first section of the View is widely understood to be influenced by the twelfth-century texts of Gerald of Wales, as transmitted by Richard Stanyhurst in his Plain and Perfect Description of Ireland included in Holinshed (1577). These works describe the Norman intervention in Ireland as a civilizing process. Such an identification of sources is problematic, however, because the ultimate purpose of the View was to discredit Stanyhurst’s argument that Irish-born descendants of the Norman conquerors of Ireland (the so-called “Old English”) should complete that task. This case of problematic sourcing is resolved given that Stanyhurst’s original text reappeared in the 1587 edition of Holinshed’s Chronicle accompanied by some translations from the writings of Gerald of Wales made by John Hooker (an English Protestant antiquarian), and also by Hooker’s own History of Ireland 1546–86, wherein Hooker attributes the disturbed condition of the country to the recalcitrance of Old English lords. This, for Hooker, and also for Spenser, proved that the Irish population of English descent was in greater need of reform than their Gaelic neighbors. Given that this was the novel argument of the View, and given close echoes between Hooker’s description of famine in Munster and similar passages in the View, Hooker’s contribution to the 1587 edition of Holinshed’s Chronicle is arguably the most potent influence on Spenser’s work.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90763647","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In The Faerie Queene’s first proem, which introduces the whole text as well as Book I, Spenser specifically invokes the creative assistance of unarmed Cupid, who also appears in the poem thereafter. Spenserians have much debated whether his disarmament means anything, and whether Platonism has any relevance. Yet previous studies have overlooked formerly well-known literary, iconographical, and hermeneutic precedents that show he thus signifies the heavenly love of virtue or amor virtutis in a Platonizing way. And they have missed the poet’s association of Cupid in this particular aspect with the Ideas. Whereas the most recent biography of Spenser calls his explicitly Christian Platonist Fowre Hymnes “anomalous” in his canon, his representation of unarmed Cupid in The Faerie Queene, we find, anticipates various features of them. As Plato had derived “hero” from “Eros” so that heroism became born of love, and attributed high accomplishments in valor, virtue, and intellect to this amorous inspiration that he especially defines in the Phaedrus and Symposium, so this poet broadly refashions heroic form by making it (h)eroic and relatively unwarlike. The Faerie Queene’s motif of the unarmed Cupid imagistically focuses these principles of Spenser’s poetics, and this study’s findings demonstrate Platonism’s importance, currently underappreciated, to the poet’s representations of love and heroism and to his whole creative enterprise.
{"title":"(H)eroic Disarmament: Spenser’s Unarmed Cupid, Platonized Heroism, and The Faerie Queene’s Poetics","authors":"Kenneth Borris","doi":"10.1086/695573","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/695573","url":null,"abstract":"In The Faerie Queene’s first proem, which introduces the whole text as well as Book I, Spenser specifically invokes the creative assistance of unarmed Cupid, who also appears in the poem thereafter. Spenserians have much debated whether his disarmament means anything, and whether Platonism has any relevance. Yet previous studies have overlooked formerly well-known literary, iconographical, and hermeneutic precedents that show he thus signifies the heavenly love of virtue or amor virtutis in a Platonizing way. And they have missed the poet’s association of Cupid in this particular aspect with the Ideas. Whereas the most recent biography of Spenser calls his explicitly Christian Platonist Fowre Hymnes “anomalous” in his canon, his representation of unarmed Cupid in The Faerie Queene, we find, anticipates various features of them. As Plato had derived “hero” from “Eros” so that heroism became born of love, and attributed high accomplishments in valor, virtue, and intellect to this amorous inspiration that he especially defines in the Phaedrus and Symposium, so this poet broadly refashions heroic form by making it (h)eroic and relatively unwarlike. The Faerie Queene’s motif of the unarmed Cupid imagistically focuses these principles of Spenser’s poetics, and this study’s findings demonstrate Platonism’s importance, currently underappreciated, to the poet’s representations of love and heroism and to his whole creative enterprise.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81310909","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：