Henry viii and the “Bewhoring” of the Petrarchan Beloved in Sixteenth-Century English Literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-16
Author(s):  
Susan Dunn-Hensley
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Sacred Feminine ◽  
Male Control ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Female Power

This article examines the ways in which changes in Marian theology and the defaming and execution of two of Henry viii’s queens affected early modern literary representations of female power. It argues that, through the translations of Thomas Wyatt, Petrarchan poetry entered into a world of state-sponsored iconoclasm, a world where images of the sacred feminine, once revered, could be destroyed, and queens, once exalted as beloveds, could quickly be reduced to “whores” and executed. The first part of the article considers Wyatt’s “Whoso list to hunt,” a translation of Petrarch’s “Rime 190,” as a lens for examining the female body as both object of desire and site of violent destruction. The second part of the article considers English Petrarchism late in the reign of Elizabeth i, examining how John Donne’s “Love’s Progress” and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (Book ii) construct violent fantasies of male control over the powerful female.

Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Barrett
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Epic Poetry ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
Early Modern English Literature ◽  
Narrative Temporality ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Though the Renaissance map—made newly accurate and newly ubiquitous by the Cartographic Revolution—delighted, inspired, and fascinated, it also unsettled, upset, and disturbed sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers. Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety is the first monograph to demonstrate how early modern anxieties about maps and map logics accompanied an early modern poetics of representational crisis. The book first considers the manifold ways that the cartographic provoked suspicion, unease, and even hostility in early modern Britain, and it highlights literature’s sensitivity to the map’s representational deceptions and politically menacing implications. Second, it explores how Renaissance English literature, and specifically epic poetry, mounted a sustained critique of cartographic materials, of their strategies of representation, and of their often realpolitik, strategically distortive uses. In considering the ways epic poetry channels anxieties about cartographic technologies into a critique of early modern literature’s own protocols of representation, the bookpursues an early modern poetics of anxiety, one that productively complicates concepts of allegory, description, personification, bibliographic materiality, narrative, temporality, analogy and other elements of literary representation. Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety reads three major poems of the period—Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622), and Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674)—in terms of their vexed and vexing relationships with cartographic materials, and shows how the productive protest staged by these texts inflects early modern and contemporary accounts of representation itself.

Remembering the Death of Turnus: Spenser'sFaerie Queeneand the Ending of theAeneid*

2011 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 430-471
Author(s):  
Lars-Håkan Svensson
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Faerie Queene

AbstractMost of the key episodes in book 1 of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590) replay famous passages in Virgil's Aeneid. However, the concluding canto, describing the Redcrosse knight's betrothal to Una, is based on Maffeo Vegio's fifteenth-century Supplementum to the Aeneid, while, surprisingly, the Aeneid's much-disputed ending appears in triplicate in early sections of book 1. This article examines the place and function of book 1’s three imitations of the Aeneid's ending, while also relating them to Spenser's appropriations of the ending in later books of The Faerie Queene. It argues that, in making Redcrosse assume the position of Aeneas in largely negative contexts, book 1 opposes standard sixteenth-century interpretations of Aeneas's pietas, whereas later books of The Faerie Queene usually conform to prevalent early modern interpretations of the moral import of this powerful cultural memory.

Spenser, Plowden, and the Hypallactic Instrument

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Zurcher
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
Psychological States ◽  
Good Works ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Since at least the work of Jones and Stallybrass on Renaissance clothing, the materially distributed nature of human identity—not merely reflected in, but constituted by, garments and other prosthetic objects—has been marked as a recurrent and distinctive feature of early modern English literary accounts of person. This article explores hybrid objects in two works by Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) and A view of the Present State of Ireland (c.1596), charting connections between Spenser’s hypallactic allegoresis and early modern common law evidentiary conventions. Spenser’s mingling of inward, psychological states (purpose, inclination, guilt, etc.) with material objects pushes against sixteenth-century protestant rejections of embodied ritual, popish vestments, devotional icons and shrines, and good works, but emerges as a powerful instrument in his proposals for social and legal ‘reform’ of Ireland.

Of Reformed Versifying

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Rhodes
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Native Form ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
English Verse ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Mean ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Stylistic Ideal

This chapter examines how the development of English poetry in the second half of the sixteenth century is characterized by the search for an appropriate style. In this context, ‘reformed versifying’ may be understood as a reconciliation of high and low in which the common is reconfigured as a stylistic ideal of the mean. That development can be traced in debates about prosody where an alternative sense of ‘reformed versifying’ as adapting classical metres to English verse is rejected in favour of native form. At the same time Sidney recuperates poetry by reforming it as an agent of virtue. Reformation and Renaissance finally come together in Spenser, who realizes Erasmus’ aim of harmonizing the values of classical literature with Christian doctrine, and reconciles the foreign and the ‘homewrought’. The Faerie Queene of 1590 represents the triumph of the mean in both style and, through its celebration of marriage, in substance.

“Swords, ropes, poison, fire”: The Dark Materials of Spenser’s Objectification of Despair-Assisted Suicide, with Notes on Skelton and Shakespeare

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-201
Author(s):  
James Nohrnberg
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Assisted Suicide ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Face ◽  
X 32 ◽  
The Faerie Queene

In the Despair episode in Spenser’s Faerie Queene i.ix, the provocative material means for self-slaughter are emblematically doubled with the psychological inducements, particularly on the models of predecessor texts in Skelton’s Magnyfycence and the Cordela story in The Mirrour for Magistrates. The pairing of means and causes is part of a tradition. So also is the despair of a Christian believer over his own sinfulness, in the face of God’s law, as voiced by a conspiratorial evil conscience, leading to a sinful “unbelief and despair of God” (Luther) and likewise unbelief in salvation—and to an unconquerable self-accusation, which doubles the sinner with tormentors, or a diabolic Accuser, and tempts him or her to cut his/her losses, relieve his/her pain, sorrows, and world-weariness, and take his/her life. Other suicidal types in The Faerie Queene and elsewhere, who are not theologically confirmed in their wanhope or assisted by it to their end, such as Phedon or Malbecco, can nonetheless illuminate the projections, temptations, demons, and motions of the Christian despair-er, and his or her adversity, depression, distress, impatience, furor, world-weariness, melancholia, and driven-ness. The despair-er’s condition, as found in Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death, can be further illustrated, diagnosed, and ministered to, by means of a variety of early modern and medieval moralizing and homiletic texts. And while the death of Shakespeare’s Cordelia by hanging conforms to Spenser’s account ( fq ii.x.32), her suicidal despair is only a slander bruited by the character Edmund. Rather, it is her would-be rescuer Lear who is the picture of misery and despair.

‘A place pickt out by choyce of best alyue,/That natures worke by art can imitate’: the Bowre of Blisse and Armida’s garden revisited

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Faerie Queene

The second chapter focuses on the best-known and most extensive imitation of Tasso’s poem in all of English literature, Spenser’s re-imagining and re-working of Armida’s enchanted garden in cantos 15 and 16 as the Bowre of Blisse in the final canto of Book 2 of The Faerie Queene (1590). Spenser’s almost immediate engagement with Gerusalemme liberata in his own romantic epic has long seen him acknowledged as ‘the arbiter of Tasso’s glory in the first half century of his life in England’. However, despite the voluminous critical work on Spenser’s episode and its sources, the profound indebtedness to Tasso throughout has, surprisingly, still not been fully appreciated and acknowledged. The second chapter of this study therefore offers a detailed re-appraisal of the complex relationship between the two episodes, to try to underline the sustained imitative virtuosity of Spenser’s emulation of his principal Italian source. The chapter also includes a brief consideration of Milton’s indebtedness to Tasso’s episode, and Spenser’s earlier imitation of it, in the poetic evocation of Eden in Book 4 of Paradise Lost.

“The Falsest Twoo”

2020 ◽  
pp. 26-49
Author(s):  
Catherine Nicholson
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Authorial Intent ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Poetic Composition

This chapter discusses the question of how to represent the orthography of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene in modern texts. Editions of Spenser's poem nearly always preserve the late sixteenth-century spellings: it is The Faerie Queene, not The Fairy Queen. The reproduction of old spellings communicates a set of seemingly irreproachable editorial commitments: to textual fidelity, to philological precision, to the material and cultural contexts of poetic composition, and, above all, to authorial intent. Ironically, however, the effects of old spelling on Spenser's modern readers are hard to justify in such terms. The chapter argues that although the “old-spelling” Faerie Queene encodes much less of Spenser's meaning than most modern editions of the poem imply, it retains more of what the poem has meant to readers, and to the tradition of literary scholarship.

The bear myth in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene

Reinardus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 115-134
Author(s):  
Jesse Russell
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Abstract The animals in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene have been skillfully treated as allegories, but these creatures also deserve a look from a mythological perspective. Perhaps the most important animal to begin with is the bear, which French historian Michel Pastoureau recently has explored in his monumental, The Bear: History of a Fallen King. Using many of Pastoureau’s insights (and criticizing others), we can make room for an analysis of The Faerie Queene as a text in which pre-modern and even ‘prehistorical’ images of bears meet with Early Modern views of the noble creature, demonstrating that, despite Spenser’s allegorical tendencies, the bears in The Faerie Queene still speak.

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