“Like Race to Runne”: The Parallel Structure of the Faerie Queene, Books I and II

PMLA ◽  
1958 ◽  
Vol 73 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 327-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. C. Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Parallel Structure ◽  
Nature And Grace ◽  
Natural Man ◽  
Repetitive Structure ◽  
The Cross ◽  
The Moment ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Faerie Queene

My Purpose in this paper is to understand the allegory of The Faerie Queene more fully by examining the relation between the first two books. It has been commonly observed that these books are parallel in structure. In each, the Knight who represents a particular virtue (Holiness, Temperance) leaves the court of the Faery Queen with a guide (Una, the Palmer), and later defeats two chief antagonists (Sansfoy and Sans-joy, Pyrochles and Cymochles); upon being separated from his guide, he enters a place of temptation (the house of Pride, the cave of Mammon), and later falls. Then being rescued by Arthur and united with his guide, he enters a place of instruction (the house of Holiness, the castle of Alma) and finally fulfills his adventure (killing the Dragon, destroying the Bower of Bliss). Such paralleling has been considered part of Spenser's design expressed in the Letter to Ralegh, to write twelve books in which twelve knights, as patrons of the twelve virtues, undertake parallel adventures assigned by the Faery Queen. That the later books do not follow this repetitive structure has been variously explained as the need to avoid monotony, to modify the design according to the virtue being treated, or simply—all too simply—as a change of plan. It was left to A. S. P. Woodhouse to explain for the first time the basis of the parallel structure of the first two books. He suggests that the two orders of nature and grace which were universally accepted as a frame of reference in the Renaissance are here carefully differentiated: “what touches the Redcross Knight bears primarily upon revealed religion, or belongs to the order of grace; whatever touches Guyon bears upon natural ethics, or belongs to the order of nature” (p. 204). It follows that the parallel structure is designed to bring into relief differences which depend upon these two orders. He finds that this difference leaves its mark chiefly upon the education received by the two knights: the Redcross knight shows the bankruptcy of natural man who must utterly depend upon heavenly grace whereas Guyon shows how natural man realizes the potentialities of his nature by ruling his passions through reason (pp. 205-206). At times, he insists more strongly than does Spenser upon an absolute separation of the two orders: Guyon's reference to “the sacred badge of my Redeemers death” confuses the separation, as does the Palmer's benediction: “God guide thee, Guyon, well to end thy warke.” Even more confusing is Guyon's invocation to Christ for His Mercy at the moment when, like Longinus, he levels his spear against the Cross: “Mercie Sir knight, and mercie Lord, / For mine offence and heedlesse hardiment, / That had almost committed crime abhord” (ii.i.27). However, thanks to Woodhouse's article, there seems no doubt now that the distinction between the two orders of nature and grace provides a necessary frame of reference for understanding the parallel structure of the first two books.

The Cross cult, King Oswald, and Elizabethan historiography

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-57
Author(s):  
Paul J. Stapleton
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
Religious Controversy ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cross ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
The Church ◽  
Made In

In Thomas Stapleton’s The History of the Church of Englande (1565), the first modern English translation of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, the cross cult is promoted as a definitive element of English religious and national identity, via the legend of the Saxon king Oswald. The version of the legend in Stapleton’s narrative, which includes textual supplements like illustrations, appears to be intended as a corrective in light of attacks upon the cross cult made in works of religious controversy by the reformists William Turner, John Jewel, and James Calfhill, but also in works of historiography such as the 1559 edition of Robert Fabyan’s Chronicle. In response to Stapleton’s expanded presentation of the Oswald legend, John Foxe reconfigures the narrative in the 1570 Acts and Monuments or Book of Martyrs, but in a bifurcated manner, perhaps to appease members of Matthew Parker’s circle of Saxon scholars. Surprisingly, in Book Three of The Faerie Queene (1590), Edmund Spenser carries on Stapleton’s iconodule understanding of Oswald’s cross in contrast to his reformist Protestant precursors.1

Reading against Time

2020 ◽  
pp. 176-215
Author(s):  
Catherine Nicholson
Keyword(s):  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Brute Force ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
Norms And Values ◽  
Crude Approximation ◽  
Time Reading ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Faerie Queene

This chapter addresses the concept of “reading against time”: reading that invokes a pressing sense of necessity in order to license a departure from established readerly norms and values. Book 5 of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene has long frustrated those who look to Spenser's poetry for wit, subtlety, and profound spiritual insight, and who expect to work hard and slowly for such rewards. Inspired in part by sympathy for the character of Cymoent, who reminds one that taking one's time with a text is not only a readerly achievement but a readerly luxury, the chapter makes a case for the unpoetic reader, for whom the demands and the insights of the moment supersede the values of patience and diligence on which poetic reading depends. The degree to which such readers have succeeded in extracting value from a part of Spenser's poem that has left more conscientious readers cold suggests that there is something to be said for urgency, haste, brute force, crude approximation, and willful anachronism: for all of the straitening and reductive tendencies of reading in a state of emergency. To put it another way, it is worth considering the etymological link between criticism and crisis.

Nature and Grace in the Faerie Queene

ELH ◽  
1949 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 194 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. S. P. Woodhouse
Keyword(s):  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Nature And Grace ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Nature and Grace in the Faerie Queene: The Problem Reviewed

ELH ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodor Gang
Keyword(s):  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Nature And Grace ◽  
The Faerie Queene

The Faerie Queene

1970 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Faerie Queene

TOWARDS THE QUESTION OF SPECIALIZED FEEDS FOR TENCHES (TINCA TINCA)

2017 ◽  
pp. 89-97
Author(s):  
Elena Mikhaylovna Chervonenko ◽  
Lina Yurievna Lagutkina
Keyword(s):  
Growth Rate ◽  
Fish Growth ◽  
Animal Origin ◽  
State Technical ◽  
Tinca Tinca ◽  
Daily Growth ◽  
Volga River ◽  
The Moment ◽  
First Time ◽  
Technical Centre

The article describes the process of tench growing (male and female species removed from set gear in the Volga river in the Astrakhan region) using experimental feedstuff "T", taking into account the fact that problems with artificial growing tench ( Тinca tinca ) appear first in the process of feeding when wild sires change to artificial food. The research took place on the base of the department of aquaculture and water bioresources of Astrakhan State Technical University in innovation centre "Bioaquapark - scientific and technical centre of aquaculture" in 2015. Special feed including components of animal origin - mosquito grab and sludge worm as an effective substitute to fish flour, as well as components of vegetable origin (carrot, parsley, pumpkin, wheatgrass) for domestication of tenches are offered for the first time. Food technology has been described. The exact composition of the formula, which is being licensed at the moment, is not disclosed. Feed "T", which has undergone biological analysis and is in accordance with organoleptic and physical standards was used for feeding tench female and male species during domestication period (60 days), along with food "Coppens" (Holland). Feed efficiency was determined according to survival and daily fish growth. Growth rate of females appeared more intensive than growth rate of males fed with experimental food "T". Daily growth changed depending on the types of food: from 0.3 ("Coppens") to 0.47 (experimental food) in females, from 0.25 ("Coppens") to 0.39 (experimental food) with males. Ability to survive among tench species fed with "Coppens" and experimental food made 60% and 100%, correspondingly. Nutricion of tench species with experimental food encouraged their domestication, which allowed using tench species in further fish breeding process in order to get offspring. The project was supported by the Innovation Promotion Fund in terms of the project "Development and implementation of the technique for the steady development of aquaculture: food "TechSA".

Reflections on the Meaning of Study Abroad

1995 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 96-103
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Shannon
Keyword(s):  
Study Abroad ◽  
Nursery School ◽  
Multiple Identities ◽  
Danger Zone ◽  
Host Family ◽  
The People ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
The Moment ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Stranger

Study abroad begins long before students leave their own shores. The moment that children enter daycare, nursery school, or kindergarten for the first time, they are in foreign territory, and all their antennae are out, testing, absorbing, learning. They begin to develop the first of their many multiple identities. They are no longer "Johnny" or "Sarah" whom everyone knows and loves at home, but Johnny or Sarah whom no one knows nor initially cares about, and they have to figure out what kind of a new identity they will develop so the danger zone becomes as safe as home.  Leaving familiar surroundings- the sounds, smells, safety, and food of home- and realizing, quite abruptly, that they must learn to adapt to the demands and needs of strangers, is the first and the most challenging "trip abroad" they will ever take. They will use the same set of skills, more mature, more polished (we hope) when they arrive on a foreign campus and move in with a host family or into an international dormitory.  Learning to make the journey with ease, whether it is on the first day of school or the day a plane drops one in a foreign field, is a necessary accomplishment. We have to make friends out of our peers; we have to gain the respect of our teachers; we have to develop curiosity and concern about the people around us. The stranger they seem, the more there is to learn. To fear diversity is to fear life itself. As the world becomes smaller and more integrated, the more crucial this accomplishment grows. 

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.

Cain’s Castles

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Milbank
Keyword(s):  
Early Christianity ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Protestant Church ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Acts And Monuments

In Chapter 1, the Reformation is presented as the paradigmatic site of Gothic escape: the evil monastery can be traced back to Wycliffe’s ‘Cain’s castles’ and the fictional abbey ruin to the Dissolution. Central Gothic tropes are shown to have their origin in this period: the Gothic heroine is compared to the female martyrs of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments; the usurper figure is linked to the papal Antichrist; and the element of continuation and the establishment of the true heir is related to Reformation historiography, which needs to prove that the Protestant Church is in continuity with early Christianity—this crisis of legitimacy is repeated in the Glorious Revolution. Lastly, Gothic uncovering of hypocrisy is allied to the revelation of Catholicism as idolatry. The Faerie Queene is interpreted as a mode of Protestant Gothic and Spenser’s Una provides an allegorical gesture of melancholic distance, which will be rendered productive in later Gothic fiction.

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