Edmund Spenser

Spenser’s evasive text manages to combine both aspects of allegory (tropological and anagogical) in order to provide a basis for Protestant conversion and spiritual enlightenment by manipulating ambiguities and distinctive comparisons throughout the text, and specifically, in Canto X.

Curated colloquy with an initial cluster of contributions by Jason Crawford, Walter Melion and Bart M. Ramakers, Michael Silk, and Nicolette Zeeman. // "What has allegory to do with personification, and personification with allegory? Are we justified in speaking, as we often do, of 'allegorical personifications' and 'personification allegory,' or does such usage, however widespread, obscure fundamental differences between the two? Why is it that the notion of allegory emerges already with some of the earliest known readers of Greek mythological poetry in the sixth century BCE, whereas full-scale personification narrative does not seem to appear until Prudentius' _Psychomachia_ in the fifth century CE? Can the histories of these concepts be brought into meaningful alignment? Can the premise of their close interrelatedness withstand rigorous theoretical scrutiny? In revisiting such questions, this colloquy hopes to spark fresh debate on what is not merely an unresolved terminological issue, but a fundamental conceptual problem with immense implications for our understanding of Western art and literature from classical antiquity to the present day."

The article argues that the soliloquy, ‘To be, or not to be,’ in Shakespeare’s Hamlet is informed by soul-sleeping: the belief that on its separation from the body at death, the soul enters an unconscious state typically described as sleep or a sleep-like stupor, in which it remains until wakened and joined with the resurrected body, and then assessed at the last judgment. The doctrine was advocated in some of Luther’s works of the 1520s and 1530s and found acceptance among some early English Protestants, but was destined to be repudiated by later Protestant orthodoxy, and was universally condemned by mainstream Protestant thinking of Shakespeare’s day. The article surveys the history of this heterodoxy in England, demonstrates its continuing significance in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, elucidates the references to the doctrine in Hamlet’s soliloquy, and discusses their relevance to the broader understanding of the religious subtext of the play.

This article attempts to show whether, and if so, to what extent, John Milton’s portrayal of Sin in Paradise Lost is underlain by Lucan’s so-called “Medusa excursus”. Scholars have shown beyond reasonable doubt that Milton’s depiction of Sin alludes to one particular English hypotext, namely Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. However, although the Lucanian character of Milton’s epic is now generally acknowledged, the “Medusa excursus” has, to date, not been considered to be a possible Latin hypotext for Milton’s depiction of Sin.

Leaving aside the indisputable similarities between Spenser’s Error and Milton’s Sin, the author shows that for all their apparent differences, Sin and Medusa actually have much more in common than it would seem at first glance. Firstly, both monsters are allegories of some primeval evil that, having set in motion a never-ending process of destruction, is portrayed as being a deadly, oxymoronic fertility that brings forth death instead of life. The morbid procreative prolificacy of both Medusa and Sin is triggered by a crime, which, once it has violated their bodies, renders them eternally “fertile in death”. While Medusa, having been mutilated by Perseus, posthumously “gives birth” to poisonous snakes, Sin, violated by Satan, literally becomes the mother of Death.

Although it is highly likely that the motif of monstrous fertility has itself been taken directly from Spenser, it would seem that Milton may also have been inspired by Lucan. The name of Cerberus, which is present in Milton and Lucan, but absent in Spenser, is a telling detail. Milton’s depiction of Death, which is described as being shapeless and similar to a substance, brings to mind Medusa’s poisonous blood. The subsequent rape of Sin by Death results in the birth of a pack of infernal dogs. This element also follows the Lucanian pattern of a crime triggering a deadly procreation by a wronged party.

Interestingly, Spenser’s depiction of Error itself contains certain motifs (for example that of “black poison” or that of the killing of a monster by a warrior) that are also present in Lucan’s Medusa excursus. This, together with some possible allusions to Hesiod’s legend of the rape of Medusa, as well as Ovid’s account of Scylla, leads us to conclude that the relationship between the discussed passages of Paradise Lost and their Lucanian and Spenserian hypotexts are quite complex, as they seem to reflect a process of elaborate contamination.

It is shown that Lucan’s depiction of Medusa may also have inspired Spenser himself. The connection between the portrayals of Medusa and Sin is not limited to the seemingly vague and superficial similarities that mainly concern the physical appearance of the two monsters, but is deeply rooted in the moral concept of a crime that triggers a perpetuum mobile of destruction. Although Milton and Spenser both share Lucan’s idea that one wrong leads to the “birth” of innumerable wrongs, only Milton consistently follows this line of thought by providing his monster with horrendous procreative powers that are also eternal and (literally) deadly. Seen against the background of Milton’s familiarity with the work and ideas of the Roman poet, it would seem that all the similarities between Sin and Medusa are far too striking to be attributable to mere coincidence.

ln this essay, l examine how the much used rhetorical strategy of appropriation causes the text of the poet to disseminate the intended meaning of the poem. l also examine the reasons that necessitated those appropriations on the part of the poet as a means of creating authority for the text that is created. Specifically，l examine Edmund Spenser's use of text from the poems of Chaucer to inustrate the ways in which appropriated text cause the discourse of the created text to undermine itself thfough dissemination of meaning.

From the book's website:

Few scholars nursed on the literary canon would dispute that knowledge of Western literature benefits readers and writers of the superhero genre. This analysis of superhero comics as Romance literature shows that the reverse is true--knowledge of the superhero romance has something to teach critics of traditional literature. Establishing the comic genre as a cousin to Arthurian myth, Spenser, and Shakespeare, it uses comics to inform readings of The Faerie Queene, The Tempest, Malory’s Morte and more, while employing authors like Ben Johnson to help explain comics by Alan Moore, Jack Kirby, and Grant Morrison and characters like Iron Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, and the Justice League. Scholars of comics, medieval and Renaissance literature alike will find it appealing.

lifetime, the place of his original works in shifting theatrical and critical reception, the role of translation in understanding what "Shakespeare" means, and finally shifts in poststructuralist conceptions of the role of language in literature and history.

This paper offers an introduction to Platonism as a context for the poetry of Edmund Spenser (1552-1599). It begins with a broad outline of sixteenth-century Platonism, and then shows how  Platonism informs Sir Kenelm Digby's (1603-1655) assessment of Spenser's poetic achievement.

Marin Barleti's "History of Scanderbeg" in English, 1560 and 1596.

Marin Barleti may be considered the father of Scanderbeg studies, with his massive work published in 1508, "Historia de vita et gestis Scanderbegi". This work has been criticized through the centuries for its exaggerations, panegyrical style, and invented speeches. Defenders of his work point to significant archival discoveries validating many of his statistics in astonishing and unexpected measure, and point out that history writing in his context allowed for didactic and artistic excursions not accepted in contemporary history writing. This paper does not make a judgment on Barleti as a historian—although it does call for caution and balance—but rather recognizes Barleti's work as the most significant work upon which Scanderbeg studies continued for centuries, pointing out the irony that many modern historians discredit Barleti on one hand, yet consult him on the other hand, whether directly or indirectly. Arguably, it is impossible to be a Scanderbeg expert without knowing Barleti well, despite one's estimation of him. As such, students of Scanderbeg are dependent on good translations of Barleti in the linga franca (if they do not read 16th century Latin). Barleti's "History of Scanderbeg" was translated into many European languages and was republished many times in the 1500s, but only came to English in full form in 1596, by Zachary Jones, a contemporary of Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare (with the caveat that he worked from Lavardin's French version, which itself was not a pure translation of Barleti, incorporating 18 other sources). This 1596 version contained a sonnet to Scanderbeg by Edmund Spenser, a fact known by Albanian scholars since 1968 (at least), when it was translated and published by both Skënder Luarasi and Androkli Kostallari. This paper reproduces and compares their two translations and also translates, for the first time, most of Zachary Jones's introduction into Albanian. Perhaps the most significant contribution of this paper is a discovery that has apparently eluded Albanian scholars until now. It is the work of Thomas Norton, who in 1560 translated and published two orations from Barleti’s magnum opus, and invented his own historically-based oration, as if it were from the voice of Scanderbeg. This discovery is even more significant when considering that Norton was the son-in-law of the Archbishop of Cantebury Thomas Cranmer, and that he was the first to make an English translation of John Calvin’s massive work, “Institutes of the Christian Religion,” one of the most significant works of Protestant theology. Such significant contributions to Scanderbeg studies in the 16th century beg the question of how accessible Barleti’s work is to present-day scholars, and whether revisions are needed and forthcoming.

Spenser's Amoretti meaning "Little Love Offerings" are an absolutely exquisite sequence of sonnets. The paper attempts to scrutinise the relation between love and violent imagery present by and by these sonnets, especially in Sonnet 57 and Sonnet 67. It was an assignment submitted in my curriculum for English Literature Honours at University of Delhi.

Халтрин-Халтурина Е.В. «Королева фей» Спенсера как «пространная аллегория»: от эмблем и кончетто – к символу // Studia Litterarum: науч. журн. 2016. Т. 1, № 3-4. М.: ИМЛИ РАН, 2016. С. 92–111. (1 п.л.). ISSN 2500-4247. DOI: 10.22455/2500-4247-2016-1-3-4-92-111.
Аннотация: Цель статьи — проанализировать аллегорическую манеру письма Спенсера на материале известного образца аллегорической литературы — поэмы «Королева фей». Понятия «аллегория» и «символ» здесь употребляются в современном значении, с опорой на терминологический аппарат, разработанный философами и историками литературы. В частности, использованы предложенные А.Ф. Лосевым и С.С. Аверинцевым описания символа и соседних с ним структурно-семантических категорий (аллегория, олицетворение абстрактного понятия, художественный образ, метафора, миф). Наиболее резко эти понятия размежевались в романтическую эпоху. Для Спенсера границы между «аллегорией» и «символом» были весьма размыты: их единила «иносказательность». Анализ примеров из «Королевы фей» свидетельствует о том, что, назвав свою поэму «пространной» аллегорией, Спенсер вышел за рамки узко-аллегорического. Аллегория Спенсера многообразна. Временами она строга и походит на трехчастные эмблемы; временами она близка развернутой метафоре («кончетто»), а иногда приближена к мифу и символу.
Abstract: The article aims to direct attention of the Russian readers to the richness of Spenser’s allegorical palette in his poem “The Faerie Queene.” The words “allegory” and “symbol” are employed here in their modern sense, with reference to the definitions discussed by scholars of literature and philosophy. In particular, the article draws on A. F. Losev’s and S. S. Averintsev’s studies of symbol and the neighboring semantic-and-structural categories (allegory, personification, artistic image, metaphor, and myth). Some of these terms were divorced from one another during the Romantic period. For Spenser, the borderline between allegory and symbol seems to be quite fuzzy: both of them convey hidden meaning. The discussion of passages from “The Faerie Queene” speaks for Spenser’s departure from the pure allegory. His “continued allegory” embraces emblems, extended metaphors (conceits), mythical and symbolic figures.
Ключевые слова: аллегория, персонификация, эмблемы, развернутая метафора, миф, символ, Красный рыцарь, Уна, Сатирон, Архимаг.
Keywords: allegory, personification, emblems, conceit, myth, symbol, Redcross knight, Una, Satyrane, Archimago.

My goal when publishing Sex & Fun in The Faerie Queene was to offer the reader what the poem is all about, without all that metaphysical and allegorical makeup. The poem is
about the Tudor succession, the Tudor dynasty and its continuation, thus preserving the unity of the nation. Books I and II form a pair, and then from Book III to Book V we see the evolution of Britomart, from a virgin to a woman, having met Arthegall and conceived a royal son (Book V, Canto 7, stanza 1-23). That son is the one we see in Book VI, Canto 2, hidden in the woods, Tristram. In Book VII, published in 1609 (as the Shake-speareʼs Sonnets) the author concluded the planetary week of the poem. Here it is a brief description of it all.

Remembering the Reformation Postgraduate Symposium, Lambeth Palace, October 2018.

This paper attempted to revive the once-popular method of analysing the historical allegory of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. It argued that Book I of the poem is structured around a potted history of the English Reformation.

Ruins were everywhere in the Renaissance. The scattered remains of the ancient past inspired humanists to think about the vast distance between themselves and antiquity. This study argues that the meditation on ruins was central to two conjoined impulses in the Renaissance: the recovery of the ancient and the creation of the new. As artists used the old to fashion the new, the ruin was the most visible sign of creative destruction. The first full-length book to document the early modern cult of the fragment, The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature argues that Renaissance humanists loved ruins because they represented the pastness of the past in a residual form. This historical consciousness propelled them into creating poetry that was self-aware of its absorption of the past and its own survival in the future. Whereas conventional literary narrative associates ruins with the Romantic ideas of melancholy and obsolescence, my work posits that the Renaissance was a ruin-naissance, the birth of ruins as objects of contemplation in which they became powerful mementos of textual recovery, cultural renewal, and ethical reflection.

Ranging from the works of Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson and Milton to those of Robert Southwell and Anna Trapnel, this study explores the conscious use of archaic style by poets and dramatists between 1590 and 1674. It focuses on the wide-ranging, complex and self-conscious uses of archaic linguistic and poetic style, analysing the uses to which writers put literary style in order to re-embody and reshape the past. It brings together scholarly conversations on temporality, memory and historiography, on the relationships between medieval and early modern literary cultures, on the workings of dramatic and poetic style, and on national history and identity. Neither pure anachronism nor pure nostalgia, the attempts of writers to reconstruct outmoded styles within their own works reveal a largely untold story about the workings of literary influence and tradition, the interactions between past and present, and the uncertain contours of English nationhood

As promised by his Amoretti sonnet 75, Edmund Spenser immortalized his loved one, Elizabeth Boyle, by extensive and ingenious name play in a number of sonnets. This is revealed here for the first time after 400 years by the author's published essay in the journal, Spenser Studies, of 2008. By this immortalization Spenser followed precedents laid down by Petrarch, Ronsard and Sidney, amongst others.

The Faerie Queene was written by John Donne with the pseudonym "Edmund Spenser" (as stated in Ver, begin, 2015). In this new work I offer a synthesis of DINS theory and a review of this epic poem in a burlesque style, rather Nashe-like. As was defended by Fowler, Evans and many others, the epic poem is finished, but imperfect.

By drawing a parallel between Miss La Trobe's pageant in Woolf's Between the Acts, and Mutabilitie's pageant in the Mutabilitie Cantos of Spenser's The Faerie Queene, this article elucidates the role played by the aevum—an order of duration that lies between time and eternity—in Woolf's last novel. While the fantasy of an aeviter-nally permanent nature is a comforting one for Lucy Swithin, this inherently conservative temporal fiction carries a troubling politics, and is deeply problematic from various perspectives. It threatens to petrify exploitative gender, colonial and class relations in a changeless nature, with no prospect of emancipatory historical change. Recognizing Woolf's use of the aevum serves to challenge Brechtian readings of the pageant, and to qualify recent interpretations of Woolf that depict her as holding a revolutionary materialist conception of history, similar to that of Walter Benjamin.

Academia.edu once requested from me an article to publish as an Academia Letter, but I decided not to try to test their scientific objectivity by sending them a brief explanation of my DINS theory, whereby it is offered contemporary evidence, textual, circumstantial, and biographical that John Donne had used pseudonyms. Months later I received the same message again. This time, I decided that I could offer them something "provocative and original" for their academic site, so that I employed some five hours to present my theory in a compact and short way. I entitled the article "Edmund Spenser: the Biographical Problem."

I identify the source for the city of Charn in C. S. Lewis's Narnian story, The Magician's Nephew in an episode from Spenser and show how Lewis had used the same source in his fairy stories for grown-ups. I take Lewis to be representing the imprisonment and frustration of long, serious and self-condemned passions, and suggest that this can apply both to the history of a culture, namely, the tradition of Courtly Love, and of an individual, indeed, I point out the autobiographical significance of the work, and the prospect that by reading fantasy we might be set free from our enchantments. I note the significance of the choice of "Digory" as the name for the protagonist and argue that Lewis may have been both emulating and transposing the achievement he esteemed in The Faerie Queene.

This thesis examines Edmund Spenser’s role as part of a group of English Protestants led by the earl of Leicester who pushed for greater English support for Protestant rebels in France and the Low Countries and opposed the negotiations for a marriage between Elizabeth I and the duc d’Anjou. It will analyse his poems Prosopopoia and The shepheardes calendar in their context as part of Leicester’s propaganda campaign against the match, and show how Spenser’s views were part of wider ‘forward Protestant’ opinion in Elizabethan England. In doing so it will combine textual analysis with an examination of the political and religious context in which the poems were written, showing how Spenser combined anti-marriage sentiment and Protestant theology to use traditional poetic forms for political purposes. It will also briefly discuss the influence that both Spenser’s poetry and the success of the opposition to the match had on the remainder of Elizabeth’s reign.

Perché le fate rapiscono i bambini? Che cos’è un changeling? Quale filo rosso unisce tante fiabe e leggende popolari ad alcuni capolavori della letteratura moderna, dal Rinascimento di Spenser e Shakespeare fino alla modernità di Hoffmann e Pirandello?

Questo studio tematico e interdisciplinare si situa all’incrocio tra etnologia e storia, tra finzione artistica e letteraria, con uno scopo preciso: interpretare un «mito» folklorico arcaico e senza tempo attraverso la rilettura che, nei secoli, ne ha fatto la tradizione colta. Un percorso testuale che è insieme un’indagine nell’inconscio collettivo e la proposta di un nuovo modello di storiografia letteraria.
(Il file contiene solamente l'introduzione. Il libro è stato pubblicato dall'editore Pacini di Pisa nel 2014: http://www.pacinieditore.it/storie-di-figli-cambiati/).

The title of Richard Nugent’s sonnet sequence, Cynthia (1604), would seem to suggest that it formed part of the tradition of celebratory verse which compared Elizabeth I to the virgin huntress and moon goddess who was variously called Diana, or Phoebe, or, as here, Cynthia. However, Nugent’s collection is aligned to an alternative centre, that of his Westmeath home, and his Cynthia cannot be readily reconciled with courtly depictions of Elizabeth I. In this essay, I explore how the sequence is affected by the political, geographical and religious complexities of early-modern Irish identity.

Nugent was well-versed in the traditions of the sonnet sequence, so it seems unlikely that the love story outlined in Cynthia is straightforwardly autobiographical: despite the speaker’s claim to have loved an Irish maiden for four painful years, before going into exile for her sake, the account is too typical of the genre to be read as confessional. Instead, some of the anomalies of the sequence suggest other possible readings. The first anomaly is the title. It seems clear that Nugent’s Cynthia is not to be read as coterminous with the English Queen in her role as virgin huntress. Nugent’s Cynthia is firmly depicted as a native of Ireland, and described as a secret concealed safely in the Irish landscape, and protected by the surrounding seas. Furthermore, Nugent’s political sympathies make a poem of praise for Elizabeth I unlikely. By 1600, spies were recording his presence in the camp of Hugh O’Neill, who was actively engaged in war on England; when he died in 1604, Nugent was part of the Irish regiment in the Spanish Netherlands. Nonetheless, through his choice of a title with such strong Elizabethan overtones, Nugent seems to have used his poem to explore the shifting allegiances of his family and their complex identity as bilingual Anglo-Normans on the borders of the Pale: certainly, in a sequence which includes allusions to the Irish poetry of his father, the poet Uilliam Nuinseann, issues of identity and language are close to the surface.

Nugent’s journey from Westmeath to Spanish Flanders highlights another presence in his work. Much Elizabethan iconography was adopted from Marian devices, and the figure of the virginal Cynthia had been aligned by the Christian moralisers of classical myth with the Virgin Mary. Although it is well established that many Elizabethan sequences utilised Marian imagery in praise of sonnet mistresses (including Elizabeth herself) the use of the same images in respect of their Italian originals, Laura or Beatrice, had been deliberately intended to recall the Marian association. Within the recusant poetry, these images were being reclaimed. Nugent’s work suggests a similar endeavour: his epithets for Cynthia incorporate the standard terms of praise, which veer between the secular and the Marian, but more specifically, they recall the explicitly Catholic titles of the litany of Loreto. Thus, Cynthia can be read as a Catholic as well as an Irish text, and its language aligns it with continental, Counter-Reformation spirituality. The poems emphasise the strong connections between sixteenth-century Ireland and Spain, running counter to English influence in the country. Their shared poetic traits argue for an important continental influence in early-modern Catholic poetry in English.