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In this extended treatment of Edmund Spenser's place in the Reformation literary tradition, John King presents the poet as a rival of classical and Italianate literary predecessors by placing his work within a distinctively English context. Rather than follow those contemporaries who rejected the unpretentious devices of mid-Tudor satire and allegory, Spenser, it is shown, infuses them with sophisticated standards of the Continental Renaissance. King's study begins with the consideration of Spenser's debut as an innovator who, paradoxically, emulates "Chaucerian" precedent for pastoral satire. By revising critical opinions that identify an iconoclastic movement in The Faerie Queene, he demonstrates the constructive aspect of the Reformation attack against idolatry that underlies the pervasive inversion and mutation of iconic tableaux in the poem. This study culminates in a detailed reading of Book I of The Faerie Queene that addresses Spenser's reformation, within the all-inclusive frame of allegorical romantic epic, of deficient and worldly forms of romance, pastoral, and tragedy into a set of purged and elevated Christian counterparts.
Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England is a wide-ranging exploration of the relationships among literature, religion, and politics in Renaissance England. Richard Mallette demonstrates how one of the great masterpieces of English literature, Edmund Spenser?s The Faerie Queene, reproduces, criticizes, parodies, and transforms the discourses of England during that remarkable political and literary era. ø According to Mallette, The Faerie Queene not only represents Reformation values but also challenges, questions, and frequently undermines Protestant assumptions. Building upon recent scholarship, particularly new historicism, Protestant poetics, feminism, and gender theory, this ambitious study traces The Faerie Queene?s linkage of religion to political and social realms. Mallette?s study expands traditional theological conceptions of Renaissance England, showing how the poem incorporates and transmutes religious discourses and thereby tests, appraises, and questions their avowals and assurances. The book?s focus on religious discourses leads Mallette to examine how such matters as marriage, gender, the body, revenge, sexuality, and foreign policy were represented?in both traditional and subversive ways?in Spenser?s influential masterpiece. ø A bold and finely argued contribution to our understanding of Spenser, Reformation thought, and Renaissance literature and society, Mallette?s study will add to the ongoing reassessment of England during this important period.
Exploring Edmund Spenser's writings within the historical and aesthetic context of colonial and agricultural reform in Ireland, his adopted home, this study demonstrates how Irish events and influences operate in far more of Spenser's work than previously suspected.
Carol V. Kaske examines how the form, no less than the theology, of Spenser's writings reveals the influence of the Bible and medieval and Renaissance Biblical hermeneutics. Her approach partakes of both the old historicism and the new. Spenser and Biblical Poetics is the first comprehensive account of the contradictions and inconsistencies in Spenser's imagery—particularly in The Faerie Queene. These and his well-known contradictions in doctrine Kaske accepts and celebrates. She shows that Spenser challenges the reader with problems arising from his endorsement of both Protestant and Catholic traditions. She connects Spenser's contradictory style not only with such religious topics (for example, adiaphorism) but also with secular ones such as colonialism, the conflict between nature and culture, and the policies of the Queen. Spenser and Biblical Poetics makes an indispensable contribution to the history of reading in the Renaissance.
Ruin and Reformation in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Marvell explores writerly responses to the religious violence of the long reformation in England and Wales, spanning over a century of literature and history, from the establishment of the national church under Henry VIII (1534), to its disestablishment under Oliver Cromwell (1653). It focuses on representations of ruined churches, monasteries, and cathedrals in the works of a range of English Protestant writers, including Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Herbert, Denham, and Marvell, reading literature alongside episodes in English reformation history: from the dissolution of the monasteries and the destruction of church icons and images, to the puritan reforms of the 1640s. The study departs from previous responses to literature's 'bare ruined choirs', which tend to read writerly ambivalence towards the dissolution of the monasteries as evidence of traditionalist, catholic, or Laudian nostalgia for the pre-reformation church. Instead, Ruin and Reformation shows how English protestants of all varieties—from Laudians to Presbyterians—could, and did, feel ambivalence towards, and anxiety about, the violence that accompanied the dissolution of the monasteries and other acts of protestant reform. The study therefore demonstrates that writerly misgivings about ruin and reformation need not necessarily signal an author's opposition to England's reformation project. In so doing, Ruin and Reformation makes an important contribution to cross-disciplinary debates about the character of English Protestantism in its formative century, revealing that doubts about religious destruction were as much a part of the experience of English protestantism as expressions of popular support for iconoclasm in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
An exploration of the ways in which new interpretations of theological doctrine inform Spenser's poetry.
In this accessible introduction to Spenser's poetry and prose, a set of fourteen essays provide extensive commentary on his life and the historical and religious contexts in which he wrote
"The first biography in sixty years of the most important non-dramatic poet of the English Renaissance"--From publisher description.
In Spenser's famous Flight, Patrick Cheney challenges the received wisdom about the shape and goal of Spenser's literary career. He contends that Spenser's idea of a literary career is not strictly the convential Virgilian pattern of pastoral to epic, but a Christian revision of that pattern in light of Petrarch and the Reformation. Cheney demonstrates that, far from changing his mind about his career as a result of disillusionment, Spenser embarks upon and completes a daring progress that secures his status as an Orphic poet. In October, Spenser calls his idea of a literary career the 'famous flight.' Both classical and Christian culture has authorized the myth of the winged poet as a primary myth of fame and glory. Cheney shows that throughout his poetry Spenser relies on an image of flight to accomplish his highest goal.
Exemplary Spenser analyses the didactic poetics of The Faerie Queene, renewing attention to its avowed attempt to "fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline" and examining how Spenser mobilises his pedagogic concerns through the reading experience of the poem. Grogan's investigation shows how Spenser transacts the public life of the nation heuristically, prompting a reflective reading experience that compels engagement with other readers, other texts and other political communities. Negotiating between competing pedagogical traditions, she shows how Spenser's epic challenges the more conservative prevailing impulses of humanist pedagogy to espouse a radical didacticism capable of inventing a more active and responsible reader. To this end, Grogan examines a wide variety of Spenser's techniques and sources, including Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy and the powerful visually-couched epistemological paradigms of early modern culture, ekphrasis among them. Importantly, Grogan examines how Spenser's didactic poetics was crucially shaped by readings of the Greek historian Xenophon's Cyropaedia, a text and influence previously overlooked by critics. Grogan concludes by reading the last book of The Faerie Queene, the Legend of Courtesy, as an attempt to reconcile his own didactic sources and poetics with the more recent tastes of his contemporaries for a courtesy theory less concerned with "vertuous and gentle discipline". Returning to the early modern reading experience, Grogan shows the sophisticated intertextual dexterity that goes into reading Spenser, where Spenserian pedagogy lies not simply in the textual body of the poem, but also in the act of reading it.