Scholars often gloss Spenser’s adjective griesly with conventional synonyms: frightful, horrible, ghastly. While Spenser’s griesly is no doubt semantically linked with these words, it does more than merely denote the frightening and bizarre. This gleaning suggests that glossing Spenser’s griesly in these terms precludes a reading of its connotative range. When read across and through Spenser’s corpus, griesly conveys three linked thematic associations: the passage of time, liminality, and senescence/mutability.
{"title":"Glossing Spenser’s Griesly","authors":"Samuel V. Lemley","doi":"10.1086/699751","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699751","url":null,"abstract":"Scholars often gloss Spenser’s adjective griesly with conventional synonyms: frightful, horrible, ghastly. While Spenser’s griesly is no doubt semantically linked with these words, it does more than merely denote the frightening and bizarre. This gleaning suggests that glossing Spenser’s griesly in these terms precludes a reading of its connotative range. When read across and through Spenser’s corpus, griesly conveys three linked thematic associations: the passage of time, liminality, and senescence/mutability.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89143565","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 develops existing scholarship about Spenser’s reconstruction of Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale in Book IV of The Faerie Queene. I suggest, first, a new reason why Renaissance literary historians should study Spenser’s imitation of Chaucer in conjunction with the printed editions that transmitted his poetry to a Tudor audience: they present a prologue for The Squire’s Tale that differs radically from modern texts. The prologue, never before discussed in a Spenserian context, identifies the Squire as a paradoxical combination of deference and assertiveness, framing his tale as the product of an active, metafictional revision; Spenser adapts this posture and poetics as his own. I propose, second, a new reason why Spenserians might consider The Squire’s Tale alongside Anelida and Arcite and The Knight’s Tale: the poems collectively articulate a pattern of Chaucerian self-revision that Spenser appropriates to claim his place in a variously national and international tradition. Mediated by his Renaissance editions, following his own feet, Chaucer provides Spenser with poems to rewrite but also with a guide to accomplish his rewriting; Chaucer is the target of Spenser’s revision as well as the model for how to do it.
{"title":"Spenser, Chaucer, and the Renaissance Squire’s Tale","authors":"Jeff Espie","doi":"10.1086/699645","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699645","url":null,"abstract":"This essay develops existing scholarship about Spenser’s reconstruction of Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale in Book IV of The Faerie Queene. I suggest, first, a new reason why Renaissance literary historians should study Spenser’s imitation of Chaucer in conjunction with the printed editions that transmitted his poetry to a Tudor audience: they present a prologue for The Squire’s Tale that differs radically from modern texts. The prologue, never before discussed in a Spenserian context, identifies the Squire as a paradoxical combination of deference and assertiveness, framing his tale as the product of an active, metafictional revision; Spenser adapts this posture and poetics as his own. I propose, second, a new reason why Spenserians might consider The Squire’s Tale alongside Anelida and Arcite and The Knight’s Tale: the poems collectively articulate a pattern of Chaucerian self-revision that Spenser appropriates to claim his place in a variously national and international tradition. Mediated by his Renaissance editions, following his own feet, Chaucer provides Spenser with poems to rewrite but also with a guide to accomplish his rewriting; Chaucer is the target of Spenser’s revision as well as the model for how to do it.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82486793","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 present essay, on Spenser’s orthography, we address the question of whether the orthography of Spenser’s texts, in early modern editions, is salient and therefore worth preserving in modern editions. Even when we face the bibliographic fact that Spenser’s texts seem not to have been regarded as so valuably idiosyncratic that early modern printers preserved them from adjustment, we may still seek to know whether the first editions of Spenser’s works are demonstrably and articulably idiosyncratic, whether orthographically, lexically, inflectionally, or syntactically. This essay formulates a method for statistically probing Spenser’s orthographic profile against what we demonstrate to be the variant, but coherent background of early printed English. We build a model of early modern orthographic change based on letter n-grams extracted from the 60,000 texts in the EEBO-TCP corpus. The n-grams yield some 30,000 features; we concentrate on a subset of the 200 most variant features, reducing the dimensionality of the data by means of principal component analysis (PCA). Situating Spenser’s texts against contemporary and near-contemporary texts, we demonstrate that, in general, Spenser’s corpus is not orthographically distinctive and propose that the impression of the linguistic distinctiveness of Spenser’s poetry is concentrated elsewhere. We conclude both with proposals for new tests that might enable us to isolate that distinctiveness and with a brief assessment of appropriate editorial responses to our investigations.
{"title":"Spenser’s Spell: Archaism and Historical Stylometrics","authors":"A. Basu, Joseph F. Loewenstein","doi":"10.1086/700300","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/700300","url":null,"abstract":"In the present essay, on Spenser’s orthography, we address the question of whether the orthography of Spenser’s texts, in early modern editions, is salient and therefore worth preserving in modern editions. Even when we face the bibliographic fact that Spenser’s texts seem not to have been regarded as so valuably idiosyncratic that early modern printers preserved them from adjustment, we may still seek to know whether the first editions of Spenser’s works are demonstrably and articulably idiosyncratic, whether orthographically, lexically, inflectionally, or syntactically. This essay formulates a method for statistically probing Spenser’s orthographic profile against what we demonstrate to be the variant, but coherent background of early printed English. We build a model of early modern orthographic change based on letter n-grams extracted from the 60,000 texts in the EEBO-TCP corpus. The n-grams yield some 30,000 features; we concentrate on a subset of the 200 most variant features, reducing the dimensionality of the data by means of principal component analysis (PCA). Situating Spenser’s texts against contemporary and near-contemporary texts, we demonstrate that, in general, Spenser’s corpus is not orthographically distinctive and propose that the impression of the linguistic distinctiveness of Spenser’s poetry is concentrated elsewhere. We conclude both with proposals for new tests that might enable us to isolate that distinctiveness and with a brief assessment of appropriate editorial responses to our investigations.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85883640","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}
Studies of The Shepheardes Calender almost exclusively focus on its first edition, printed by Hugh Singleton in 1579. Yet in 1580, Singleton sold his publication rights to John Harrison II, who controlled its printing for the next twenty years. This essay traces how a series of printers enlisted by Harrison in the late sixteenth century made subtle changes to The Shepheardes Calender that de-emphasize its emblems and glosses. It argues that these changes reshape the central kineticism of the Calender that relies on the interplay between its eclogues and paratexts to vary how readers move through the work. By articulating how Spenser’s text connects serial reading with the passage of linear time, this essay calls new attention to the role played by mise-en-page in amplifying the Calender’s complex temporality.
{"title":"Time, Reading, and the Material Text: Revising Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender","authors":"Jessica Beckman","doi":"10.1086/699648","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699648","url":null,"abstract":"Studies of The Shepheardes Calender almost exclusively focus on its first edition, printed by Hugh Singleton in 1579. Yet in 1580, Singleton sold his publication rights to John Harrison II, who controlled its printing for the next twenty years. This essay traces how a series of printers enlisted by Harrison in the late sixteenth century made subtle changes to The Shepheardes Calender that de-emphasize its emblems and glosses. It argues that these changes reshape the central kineticism of the Calender that relies on the interplay between its eclogues and paratexts to vary how readers move through the work. By articulating how Spenser’s text connects serial reading with the passage of linear time, this essay calls new attention to the role played by mise-en-page in amplifying the Calender’s complex temporality.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78647007","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}
Victorian scholars of the Renaissance took the backward gaze of Spenser’s Faerie Queene at an imaginary chivalric England as a magic lantern by which the England of the 1590s could be projected back in time so that it preceded the Renaissance Italy of the 1490s, keeping the Elizabethan era innocent of the excesses of the Renaissance. For critics of the 1890s (including Ruskin as reframed by William Morris), Spenser offered a periodization that went backward. To some extent our current questions of periodization continue to stumble on this revisionist (maybe insufficiently revisionist) account of the relation of medieval and Renaissance.
{"title":"Spenser, Ruskin, and the Victorian Culture of Medieval England","authors":"William N. West","doi":"10.1086/699752","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699752","url":null,"abstract":"Victorian scholars of the Renaissance took the backward gaze of Spenser’s Faerie Queene at an imaginary chivalric England as a magic lantern by which the England of the 1590s could be projected back in time so that it preceded the Renaissance Italy of the 1490s, keeping the Elizabethan era innocent of the excesses of the Renaissance. For critics of the 1890s (including Ruskin as reframed by William Morris), Spenser offered a periodization that went backward. To some extent our current questions of periodization continue to stumble on this revisionist (maybe insufficiently revisionist) account of the relation of medieval and Renaissance.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76123049","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}
John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (1851–53) is suffused with Spenser’s Faerie Queene. This essay proposes that Ruskin’s view of Spenser’s allegorical women repeats and intensifies an aesthetic experience that The Faerie Queene models: the view of a woman in which one looks at her but does not see. Since The Stones of Venice aligns active feminine sexuality with the Renaissance itself, Ruskin thus, by means of Spenser, offers a periodized aesthetics in which the medieval allows us not to see the Renaissance, no matter how much it comes into our view.
{"title":"Ruskin’s Taste in Spenserian Women: Not Looking at the Renaissance","authors":"Katherine Eggert","doi":"10.1086/699750","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699750","url":null,"abstract":"John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (1851–53) is suffused with Spenser’s Faerie Queene. This essay proposes that Ruskin’s view of Spenser’s allegorical women repeats and intensifies an aesthetic experience that The Faerie Queene models: the view of a woman in which one looks at her but does not see. Since The Stones of Venice aligns active feminine sexuality with the Renaissance itself, Ruskin thus, by means of Spenser, offers a periodized aesthetics in which the medieval allows us not to see the Renaissance, no matter how much it comes into our view.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77694053","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}
Spenser’s The Faerie Queene constitutes an Aristotelian inquiry into ethics because of its continual demand for judgment. For Aristotle, there is no single rule for what constitutes good action; similarly, in The Faerie Queene, there is no single rule for interpreting the poem’s allegories. The agent or reader must evaluate the unique circumstances of each case before she can act or interpret correctly. In The Faerie Queene, this is partly because the significance of individual characters, motifs, and actions changes radically from episode to episode. Spenser’s wide range of literary and philosophical sources likewise means that the poem has no single interpretive key. The variation and diversity of The Faerie Queene offer, not rules to follow or examples to imitate, but rather, case studies to analyze, whose narrative particularity both demands and develops judgment. I analyze key episodes from Books I, II, and V, and show that if we attempted to derive general ethical or interpretive rules from these episodes, these rules would lead us to misread other parts of the poem. To interpret the poem adequately, we must develop and apply an informed judgment to each individual case—the same process required of an Aristotelian ethical agent.
{"title":"The Faerie Queene as an Aristotelian Inquiry into Ethics","authors":"Maria Devlin McNair","doi":"10.1086/699644","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699644","url":null,"abstract":"Spenser’s The Faerie Queene constitutes an Aristotelian inquiry into ethics because of its continual demand for judgment. For Aristotle, there is no single rule for what constitutes good action; similarly, in The Faerie Queene, there is no single rule for interpreting the poem’s allegories. The agent or reader must evaluate the unique circumstances of each case before she can act or interpret correctly. In The Faerie Queene, this is partly because the significance of individual characters, motifs, and actions changes radically from episode to episode. Spenser’s wide range of literary and philosophical sources likewise means that the poem has no single interpretive key. The variation and diversity of The Faerie Queene offer, not rules to follow or examples to imitate, but rather, case studies to analyze, whose narrative particularity both demands and develops judgment. I analyze key episodes from Books I, II, and V, and show that if we attempted to derive general ethical or interpretive rules from these episodes, these rules would lead us to misread other parts of the poem. To interpret the poem adequately, we must develop and apply an informed judgment to each individual case—the same process required of an Aristotelian ethical agent.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/699644","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72381917","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 Book VI of The Faerie Queene, Spenser figures courtesy as a uniquely self-divided virtue. Alternating between benign and malign manifestations with such ease and rapidity that these seeming opposites become indistinguishable from one another, Spenser’s courtesy is a means of utopian progress and dystopian catastrophe at one and the same time. Embodied as much by the Blatant Beast as the courteous knight who seeks to contain it, the virtue functions less as an instrument of ideological motivation than as an index of the way that historical crisis obscures the difference between culture and its barbarous Other. Book VI ultimately thematizes and trains readers not in a politics per se, but in the critical agency that Spenser describes as “wary boldness,” a proto-political faculty governed by the tension between aesthetic experience and social praxis. The essay concludes by arguing for the value of Adornian theory in thinking through this tension, as it exists in The Faerie Queene, early modern literature, and contemporary critical practice.
{"title":"Wary Boldness: Courtesy and Critical Aesthetics in The Faerie Queene","authors":"Richard Lee","doi":"10.1086/699642","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699642","url":null,"abstract":"In Book VI of The Faerie Queene, Spenser figures courtesy as a uniquely self-divided virtue. Alternating between benign and malign manifestations with such ease and rapidity that these seeming opposites become indistinguishable from one another, Spenser’s courtesy is a means of utopian progress and dystopian catastrophe at one and the same time. Embodied as much by the Blatant Beast as the courteous knight who seeks to contain it, the virtue functions less as an instrument of ideological motivation than as an index of the way that historical crisis obscures the difference between culture and its barbarous Other. Book VI ultimately thematizes and trains readers not in a politics per se, but in the critical agency that Spenser describes as “wary boldness,” a proto-political faculty governed by the tension between aesthetic experience and social praxis. The essay concludes by arguing for the value of Adornian theory in thinking through this tension, as it exists in The Faerie Queene, early modern literature, and contemporary critical practice.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77175928","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 argues that March’s reception of ancient pastoral is shaped by recent developments in Northern humanist philology. First of all, it imitates an idyll that received no scholarly attention until the mid-sixteenth century. The poem benefits, moreover, from Baïf’s reconstruction of a textual crux in Moschus 1. Finally, March also receives from Baïf its method of imitating Virgil, which reflects contemporary insight into Virgil’s reception of Hellenistic poetry. All of these developments arise from the practice of comparative exegesis, a philological method perfected by Parisian humanists. This essay thus aims to place March in the context of a particular cultural movement, namely sixteenth-century French Hellenism.
{"title":"Spenser’s March and Sixteenth-Century Philology","authors":"D. Adkins","doi":"10.1086/695579","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/695579","url":null,"abstract":"This essay argues that March’s reception of ancient pastoral is shaped by recent developments in Northern humanist philology. First of all, it imitates an idyll that received no scholarly attention until the mid-sixteenth century. The poem benefits, moreover, from Baïf’s reconstruction of a textual crux in Moschus 1. Finally, March also receives from Baïf its method of imitating Virgil, which reflects contemporary insight into Virgil’s reception of Hellenistic poetry. All of these developments arise from the practice of comparative exegesis, a philological method perfected by Parisian humanists. This essay thus aims to place March in the context of a particular cultural movement, namely sixteenth-century French Hellenism.","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":"75346212","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}
Two memorials to Arthur Grey, fourteenth baron of Wilton, Lord Deputy of Ireland (1580–82) and employer of Edmund Spenser, survive in Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin. They have received little attention for over a century. Among the few early modern monuments to survive in Ireland, they consist of a heraldry-decorated stone mural tablet and a remarkable memorial in brass, the only such pre-Victorian example in the cathedral and one of only eight surviving pre-1700 brasses in Ireland. Embellished with a rich display of heraldic quarterings, this possibly locally-made brass includes traces of colored enamel as well as a rare record of the two sons of Grey’s second wife, who died during their time in Dublin. This article brings these monuments to wider notice and casts light on the wider cultural interests of an English Tudor governor of Ireland.
{"title":"Two Memorials to Arthur Grey de Wilton, Lord Deputy of Ireland (1580–82), in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin","authors":"Stuart Kinsella","doi":"10.1086/694443","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/694443","url":null,"abstract":"Two memorials to Arthur Grey, fourteenth baron of Wilton, Lord Deputy of Ireland (1580–82) and employer of Edmund Spenser, survive in Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin. They have received little attention for over a century. Among the few early modern monuments to survive in Ireland, they consist of a heraldry-decorated stone mural tablet and a remarkable memorial in brass, the only such pre-Victorian example in the cathedral and one of only eight surviving pre-1700 brasses in Ireland. Embellished with a rich display of heraldic quarterings, this possibly locally-made brass includes traces of colored enamel as well as a rare record of the two sons of Grey’s second wife, who died during their time in Dublin. This article brings these monuments to wider notice and casts light on the wider cultural interests of an English Tudor governor of 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":"75139635","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}
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