This essay argues for the essential importance of myth and parody to Renaissance writing and connects them with still movement, a punning paradox that both Spenser and Shakespeare engage. Still mov...

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.

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.

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.

There seems to be no bear market in sight for what some call “animal studies” or, to include a larger swathe of creatures, the study of the “nonhuman.” Not only animals and insects and trees have been of interest, but more recently, a wide array of inanimate objects and substances. Scholars of early modernity have been no exception to this more general trend. It has been hard not to notice how large William Shakespeare looms in such conversations. But do the vagaries of literary celebrity explain the diminished presence of other figures? Why, that is, has Edmund Spenser not been a primary interlocutor in recent conversations about creaturely life in the Renaissance? And what might explain the relative dearth of conversation in Spenser studies itself? This seems especially remarkable given the way a variety of life forms run riot in The Shepheardes Calender, The Faerie Queene, and elsewhere. This essay will suggest two primary reasons for this trend, both related to forms of captivating inhumanity central to both Spenser and the critical tradition. First, the incredible gravity that instances of dehumanization have exercised on Spenser studies has made it difficult to see beasts as anything more than aspects of the bestialization of humans. Second, the inhumanity of allegorical reading and writing has made other forms of life hard to see in that certain allegorical reading strategies strip away creaturely life (human and nonhuman) to bare significance while allegorical writing has always been a complex and we might say inhuman mechanism of humanization and personation whose ultimate aim is to trap all life and all matter into some species of agentive, so-called humanity. Thus the task of reading Spenser is to consider to what extent his constitutive and signature inhumanity is a product of violence alone or an incitement to a greater range and vitality of life.

Previous articleNext article FreeThe Meaning of “Imply” in The Faerie Queene III.vi.34Rodney Stenning EdgecombeRodney Stenning EdgecombeUniversity of Cape Town Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe Garden of Adonis (Book III of The Faerie Queene) amounts to a closed-system terrarium avant la lettre, not least because its plants have no dependence on the … water of the ford, Or of the clouds to moysten their roots dry;For in themselues eternall moisture they imply.(III.vi.34).1 One’s first impulse is to give this verb the same meaning it enjoys in I.xi. (“Striving to loose the knot, that fast him tyes / Himselfe in streighter bands too rash implyes”), where the effort of the Red Cross Knight to free himself from the dragon’s coils serves only to wind them all the more tightly about himself. Here the situation fully validates the etymon “implicare” and so activates the various English significations of “imply” cited in OED, viz., “enfold,” “enwrap,” “entangle” and “involve.” These are all transitive verbs indicating an intricate, flexible encirclement of a hard, often resistant, object from without. Whether water, impressible and unresistant, lends itself to “implication” in this sense is matter for debate, but, if it does, we still need slightly to redefine it, for Spenser is talking about the vascular enclosure of moisture within the plants—a situation better registered by the Latin “concludere” and the English sense derived from that.It occurs to me, therefore, that the poet probably devised a once-off inkhorn coinage of “imply”=“fill” at this point of The Faerie Queene, basing it upon the Latin verb “implere.” Short-circuiting the French route by which “implicare” lost its “ca” syllable, he would have conceived the Latin etymon for the third person plural of the present tense as “implicant,” and the equivalent form of “imply”=“fill” (supposing him to have thought along these lines) as “implent.” It would therefore have been as easy as it would have been fitting to make “imply” stand for both. In the Garden of Adonis, the plants enclose their own moisture, a fact that enables them to “fill” or irrigate themselves.Note1. Quotation from E. de Selincourt, ed., Edumund Spenser, Poetical Works (1910; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Spenser Studies Volume 292014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.7756/spst.029.015.325-326 Views: 157Total views on this site Copyright © 2014 AMS Press, Inc. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

This article considers the significance of two competing versions of matter represented in the opening canto of The Faerie Queene. The first, given shape in the tree catalogue (I.i.8–9), introduces the perspective of instrumental materialism (associated with the Greek hyle): the idea that matter comprises a vast storehouse of resources for human use. The second, dramatized by the Redcrosse Knight’s ensuing battle with the monster Errour (I.i.14–26), embodies chaotic matter (associated with the Latin materia), which subverts the instrumental by highlighting matter’s resistance to fixed form, along with the human subject’s entanglement in the material world. Taken together, these episodes demonstrate how the failure of instrumentality reconfigures humankind’s relationship with the material world; the economic tenor of the tree catalogue gives way to the grotesque ecology of Errour. I argue that Spenser utilizes these two versions of matter to embody the problem of literary production at this opening juncture of his epic. While one version offers a link to the literary past (even as it threatens sterile imitation), the other embodies the promise of creating something new, while highlighting the danger of chaotic formlessness.

This article contends that in his treatment of the St. George legend Edmund Spenser utilized a heightened sense of historical perspective that developed in Italy among Quattrocento humanists like Mantuan (Baptista Mantuanus). A commonly held assumption that humanist poets could not have taken the legend seriously has obscured the fact that Mantuan and Alexander Barclay composed poems using the material and that Spenser, who modeled his Shepheardes Calender partly on Mantuan’s eclogues, would almost certainly have known the Georgius, Mantuan’s hagiographic epic on St. George. In comparison to Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea, Spenser’s most commonly accepted source, the Quattrocento Italian poet forged a new, humanist relationship between truth and fiction in his Georgius, transposing Alcyone’s lament and the fen with its dragon into a poetic mode of discourse which, following the implications of Anne Moss’s Latin language turn, resists categorization as being either “true” or “false.” In representing his Christian saint as converting the pagan citizenry and reorienting the Graeco-Roman gods within a changed, New Testament world, Mantuan gave Spenser a model when he envisioned the Red Cross’s struggle with the dragon as the concluding, climactic event within Judeo-Christian history. The Georgius would thus seem to supply the missing term between de Voragine’s version and Spenser’s visionary reimagining of the story, encouraging the English poet to go beyond the contempt of sixteenth-century Reformers for saints’ lives and use the material to shape “an empire nowhere,” a transcendent spiritual and material potentiality rooted, like Mantuan’s hagiographic epic, within a humanist treatment of Judeo-Christian time.