Spenser And Biblical Poetics

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.

This book defines Platonism's roles in early modern theories of literature, and then reappraises the major Platonizing poet Edmund Spenser

An exploration of the ways in which new interpretations of theological doctrine inform Spenser's poetry.

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.

This book offers a fresh reading of Spenser's poetry in the light of his Protestantism. Previous critics have devoted much space to the poet's debt to the literature of antiquity and the Renaissance, as well as to his knowledge of Neoplatonism, mythograph, and iconography; but less has been written about the imaginative consequences for his poetry of his Protestantism, largely conditioned by the Elizabethan religious milieu. Dr Hume seeks to illuminate Spenser's major poems, The Shepheardes Calender and The Faerie Queene, by placing them in a relevant context of Elizabethan Protestant thought and writings. Her detailed analysis shows how words, images and episodes in both poems come into focus when the reader takes account of sermons, biblical commentaries, devotional treatises and controversial works of the Elizabethan decades.