“To knit the knot that euer shall remaine”: Spenser with Jean-Luc Marion

The Amoretti is Spenser’s phenomenology of marriage, that is, an attempt to think marriage in general and in the particularity of his own concrete experience of pursuing a second marriage with Elizabeth Boyle. Jean-Luc Marion’s examination of the “erotic phenomenon” can help us see the paradoxes and the high stakes, personal and philosophical, that Spenser’s courtship inevitably confronts: that marriage always already constitutes an oath of eternal fidelity made, however, against the horizon of its own dissolution at death. Spenser knows this problem well, having experienced the death of his first wife. His elaborately stylized performance not only draws attention to the way that Platonic Christian conceptualizations of eros elide these paradoxes but also allows him to play with the terms and conventions that have haunted so many of his predecessor love poets, especially Petrarch. In so doing, the poet sets committed erotic love in the Amoretti within a kind of Christian existentialist understanding of being—a conception that renders the sacred and, indeed, the grace of God as phenomena within mortal embodied experience.