On the Politics of Parallelism: Biblical Allusions in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

Abstract: Modern scholarship tends to investigate biblical poetry in an exhaustive, disciplined fashion and thus defines parallelism in an apolitical way. Returning to the premodern period, more partial conceptions of parallelism can newly open the question of the form’s politics. I argue that Spenser shapes the episode of the Egalitarian Giant in The Faerie Queene around his conception of biblical parallelism, which involves a recourse to literary balance to transcend political tensions within scripture. In The Faerie Queene , we see an early employment of a literary approach to Scripture to contain political conflict; Spenser’s conception of parallelism testifies both to biblical poetry’s fractious, radical possibilities to disrupt the social order and to the emergence of a more detached, disciplined, and aestheticized approach to that poetry.