“In wounded hart”: Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the Emergency of Healing
Résumés
Cet article porte sur une sélection de récits de The Faerie Queene de Spenser, en mettant l’accent sur les contextes dans lesquels sont évoqués la maladie, la guérison et la convalescence. Il examine la manière dont Spenser établit un schéma narratif clair, qui voit les les protagonistes de ce poème épique s’engager, à intervalles réguliers et dans chacun des “livres” qui composent l’œuvre, dans la quête d’un refuge où bénéficier d’une intervention médicale et thérapeutique. L’étude s’intéresse tout particulièrement à la façon dont Spenser réinterprète les discours catholiques sur l’échec spirituel et la guérison à l’intention du public protestant de l’Angleterre du XVIe siècle.
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- 1 William Webbe, A Discourse of English Poetrie, London, John Charlewood for Robert Walley, 1586, sig (...)
1Nowe will I speake somewhat, of that princelie part of Poetrie, wherein are displaied the noble actes and valiant exploits of puissaunt Captaines, expert souldiers, wise men, with the famous reportes of auncient times.1
- 2 Ibid., sig. E1v. For discussion of the ways in which humanists considered earlier medieval romances (...)
- 3 Epigram 64: “Of Spencers Faiery Queene”, in Thomas Freeman, Rubbe, and a great cast Epigrams, Londo (...)
2William Webbe sought in his Discourse of English Poesie (1586) to offer, amongst other things, a fulsome appreciation of the revered undertaking of epic poetry, paying sustained tribute to the achievements of Homer and Virgil. His tract pre-dated the appearance in print of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Sir John Harington’s translation into English of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, for example, and thus Webbe gave voice to a familiar lament for his Elizabethan readership – “To these […] we haue no English worke aunswerable”.2 Nonetheless, a generation later, in Rubbe and A great Cast (1614), Thomas Freeman invited his Jacobean readers to trace a much more reassuring, heroic genealogy of epic poets, finding its terminus in the land of the Tudors: “Virgil from Homer, th’Italian from him, / Spenser from all, and all of these I weene, / Were borne when Helicon was full to th’brim”.3
- 4 All references from Spenser’s epic are taken from Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hami (...)
- 5 Sir Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, London, John Windet for William Ponsonbie, 1 (...)
3The first three books of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene appeared in 1590 and the second iteration, now extending to Book Six, rolled from the presses six years later in 1596. The discussion which follows argues that this epic vision of chivalric romance published in the final decade of the sixteenth century, evoking “[f]ierce warres and faithfull loues”,4 creates an extraordinary poetic world in which to consider not only allegorical interpretations of knightly quests and military service, but also the recursive textual attention to reception, shelter and healing in this magnum opus. Spenser’s eminent contemporary, Philip Sidney, had re-affirmed in his Arcadia (1st ed. 1590) that “the law of hospitality (so long & holily obserued among you) […] [should] defend a straunger fled to your armes for succour”5 and the narratives of The Faerie Queene repeatedly unveil questers, antagonists and fugitives traversing a fallen landscape, riddled with labyrinths, dark forests, monstrous apparitions and spiritual threats in the shape of deadly temptations. Such figures are also often depicted as desperately seeking the protection of the law described in the Arcadia. Indeed, as the community of beleaguered knights, victims and refugees proliferates with the unfolding of this epic, Spenser’s readers are compelled again and again to consider the politics of welcome and convalescence in a host of different textual locations.
- 6 See: Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990; Julia Reinh (...)
- 7 See: Georgia Ronan Crampton, The Condition of Creatures: Suffering and Action in Chaucer and Spense (...)
- 8 F. David Hoeniger describes this episode as “Spenser’s most detailed description of leechcraft or m (...)
4The present discussion engages with a critical field established by ground-breaking studies concerning early modern practices of reception, such as those by Felicity Heal, Julia Reinhard Lupton, David Goldstein and Judith Still.6 In addition, it acknowledges the achievements of Spenserian scholarship in terms of the depiction of martial violence, psychological torment and the suffering body in key interventions by Georgia Ronan Crampton, Marion A. Wells, Michael Schoenfeldt, Joseph Campana, for example, but re-focuses attention specifically upon the textual commitment to shelter and healing in Spenser’s epic.7 The narratives of The Faerie Queene may be seen to return rhythmically to refuges of curative intervention and protection – and to a range of narrative agents of quite differing moral complexions: e.g. Sansjoy is transported to the infernal realm of Aesculpius to find a remedy for his injuries (I.v); accompanied by Una, the despairing Redcrosse is welcomed to the House of Holiness (I.x); Guyon and the Palmer seek shelter in the House of Medina, Perissa and Elissa (an encounter which concludes with the hosts’ reception of the child Ruddymane, II.ii-iii); after his combat with Maleger, the wounded Arthur is attended to by a devoted Alma (II.xi); wounded in the thigh, the ailing Timias is nursed to recovery by Belphoebe (III.v);8 Cambell is healed by the power of a magic ring (IV.iii); the languid Marinell is healed of his love-sickness by the sea god Tryphon and the return of Florimell (III.iv; IV.xi-xii); the wounded Aladine is attended to in his father’s house by Priscilla (VI.iii); and injured in their encounters with the Blatant Beast, Timias and Serena have their health restored through the salutary counsel of the hermit (VI.v-vi). The discussion which follows of selected narrative scenes from this epic is designed to bear witness to the variety of ways in which Spenser can conceive of reception and healing in The Faerie Queene.
- 9 Robert M. Rakoff, “Ideology in Everyday Life – The Meaning of the House”, Politics and Society, 7, (...)
5The proliferating narrative spaces concerning restorative care in Spenser’s epic are typically protected from what Robert M. Rakoff has termed, in a more general theoretical discussion of home and shelter, “the felt chaos of the outside world”.9 Indeed, if there is the instance of the refusal of care expressed to Calepine and Serena at Turpine’s castle, for example, this is later compensated by the compassionate responses of the “saluage man” in the forest (VI.iv.versicle). More broadly, as readers are drawn into the perilous, conflict-ridden environments of this unfinished epic, we are made to realise the impermanence of any lasting claims to human achievement. Shaken by the rigours of seemingly unending cycles of ordeals and temptations, Spenser’s protagonists are often found wanting as they confront these daunting challenges. In due course, they come to recognize their need for physical and spiritual healing – needs which are repeatedly responded to through demonstrations of compassion, welcome and care. Time and again, the commitment to healing and comfort (somatic, social and/or spiritual) is evidenced in the epic’s intrigues. This discussion considers a range of examples of such behaviours from across three different Books of The Faerie Queene, paying particular attention to the ways in which curative interventions and experiences of recuperation are staged in Spenser’s poetic narratives.
6As will become apparent, the myriad identities of host, guest and patient adopted in The Faerie Queene remain deeply imbricated in the poem’s larger textual undertakings of spiritual enquiry, political critique and moral reflection. In a prefatory discussion to a late Elizabethan text by Richard Greenham, A most sweete and assured comfort for all those that are afflicted in conscience (1595), a certain “W. I.” stressed that
- 10 Richard Greenham, A most sweete and assured comfort for all those that are afflicted in conscience,(...)
The sicke saith our Sauior, neede the Phisition: no mortall man but hath been soule sicke, and therfore all men need comfort. It is necessarie that he which ministreth to the diseased shuld know the cause of the sicknes, that being remoued the medicine may more effectually worke: & they that minister the woord, ought to haue a feeling of their brethrens infirmities, that they may bee able to comfort the cast downe conscience, stirre the secure soul, and weaken the proud thought […] the Author of this treatise was such a one.10
- 11 Richard Chamberlain, Radical Spenser. Pastoral, Politics and the New Aestheticism, Edinburgh, Edinb (...)
7In the context of such interventions in early modern print culture, Spenser’s concern with the urgent human need for healing, convalescence and guidance (both in spiritual as well as physical terms) may be inscribed within a much wider medical and theological debate in the period concerning the nature of human frailties. Indeed, focusing particular attention upon the reiterated need to attend to both the body and soul of the human subject in The Faerie Queene, Richard Chamberlain has persuasively highlighted the tendency of Spenser’s epic to maintain “a dialectical relationship between inside and outside […]. The contrast between internal and external space which is fundamental to the idea of enclosure is used to produce different attitudes, from comforting rightness to outright fear”.11 This very tension between internal/external, hosting/receiving, body/soul underpins key aspects of story-telling in The Faerie Queene and will constitute a dominant enquiry in the discussion which follows.
Ministering to the Sick: Curative Intervention in Early Modern England
- 12 Andrew Pettegree underlines that “Lord Burghley and his son Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury […] [bo (...)
- 13 All quotations from the Geneva Bible are taken from: The Bible and Holy Scriptures conteyned in the (...)
8In material terms, Andrew Pettegree has stressed not only that “[t]he sixteenth century was an era of unremitting hardship for those who fell ill”, but also how a preoccupation with medicinal cures exercised all levels of society from “more pragmatic, observation-based folk culture” to those of rank who sought to familiarise themselves with the latter as well as published accounts of Galenic treatments inherited from antiquity and elaborated upon incrementally with the passage of the centuries.12 For those seeking Scriptural authorities for the commitment to care-giving and healing, exempla abounded throughout the narratives of the Old and New Testaments. In Exodus in the Geneva Bible (1560), for instance, the early modern reader learned that Jehovah would send an angel to go before and to look after His people in the wilderness: “For ye shall serve the Lord your God, & he shal blesse thy bread and thy water, & I will take all sicknes away from the middes of thee” (Ex.23.25).13 Later, in the New Testament in Matthew’s gospel, Christ might be discovered being petitioned by
a Centurion, beseeching him […] Lord, my seruant lieth at home sicke of the palsie, grieuously tormented. And Iesus saith vnto him, I wil come, and heale him. But the Centurion answered, saying, Lord, I am not worthie that thou shuldest come vnder my ro[o]fe: but speake the worde onely, and my seruant shalbe healed. (Matt.8.5-8)
- 14 “The Epistle Dedicatorie”, in John Banister, A needefull, new, and necessarie treatise of Chyrurger (...)
- 15 “May”, ll. 164-165. See Edmund Spenser, The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard A. McCabe, Harmondsworth, Pe (...)
- 16 Andrew Boord, The breuiarie of health […], London, Thomas East, 1587, sig. D5r.
9In the context of The Faerie Queene, such oft-repeated Biblical proofs signalling the spiritual commitment to reception and healing must be examined in terms of the tumultuous landscape of Reformation Europe. If the eminent Tudor surgeon John Banister (1533-1610) argued that “[e]uerie Art is necessarie, and eche part of Physicke is needeful: no age can be without them […] neither will any nation despise the goodly creature of God (for so is Physicke in the booke of Ecclesiasticus named)”,14 it soon becomes evident that the age’s investigation into care of the ailing was all too often played out and understood (like so many other matters) through the bitterly adversarial politics of divided faith communities. In Spenser’s own Shepheardes Calender (1579) the swain Piers insists to Palinode, “Shepheard, I list none accordaunce make/With shepheard, that does the right way forsake”15; and such pressing concerns with justness in professions of faith and allegiance frequently framed considerations of the treatment of bodily disorders. Andrew Boorde (or Borde), styling himself “Doctor of phisicke, an English-man” in his Breuiarie of health (1547?), was much exercised not only to clarify “all maner of sicknesses & diseases”, but also many and various instances of wrong-turnings: “[in Rome] I went to […] religious houses, as the Celestines & to the Chapterhouse, and there I did see nulla ordo […] I did goe amonge the fryers mendicants, and monkes & canons & cardynalls […] rounde about Rome, & in euery place I did see Lechery & Boggery, deceit and vsury”.16 It was in such ways that early modern readers were frequently urged to consider physical infirmities in the same lens with cultural disorders.
- 17 In terms of the errant nature of Spenser’s protagonists in this epic, Susanne L. Wofford contends c (...)
- 18 Claire McEachern, “Spenser and Religion”, in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Spense (...)
- 19 Ibid., p. 30.
- 20 William Turner, A new booke of spirituall physic, Emden, Egidius van der Erve, 1555, p. 71.
10The (mis)adventures of Spenser’s erring knights and their companions all too often involve quests for redemptive justice, physical protection, curative intervention and/or spiritual solace.17 As readers, we are compelled to bear witness repeatedly to the epic’s protagonists straining to negotiate acutely demanding, frequently punishing conditions of existence: this is what Claire McEachern has termed “a contention-ridden – that is, richly dramatic – landscape of religious and political orders”.18 If, as McEachern justly underlines, Spenser’s “poetry can picture this terrain in terms of antithesis”,19 his readers are asked to view the antagonists in the epic landscape through strategically privileged angles of vision. The felt chaos of Spenser’s epic world can frequently be figured forth as, what William Turner’s new booke of spirituall physik (1555) termed, “the Romyshe pokkes [pox], false religion papistrie, and vnwrytten worshippyng of God, fathers fantasies”.20 Indeed, amongst notable contemporary productions, John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1st Latin pub. 1554, 1st Eng. pub. 1563) similarly evoked the contaminating influence of the Catholic church in no uncertain terms for a national readership:
- 21 John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, London, John Day, 1583, p. 154. In this context, see Andrew Hadfield (...)
first began to creepe from the cold field into warme townes and cloysters: from townes, then into citties, and at length from their close cellers and citties, vnto Cathedrall Churches [...] where, not onely they did abound in wealth and riches (especially these Monkes of our latter tyme), but much more did swimme in superstition and Pharisaicall hipocrisie.21
- 22 Gary Waller, Edmund Spenser: A Literary Life, Basingstoke, MacMillan, 1994, p. 10, 56.
- 23 “Maye”, gloss 174. See E. Spenser, The Shorter Poems, op. cit., p. 84.
- 24 For further discussion here, see, for example: Anthea Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet, Cambri (...)
11In this context of the rancorous cultural debates of post-Reformation Britain, Gary Waller argues persuasively that “[i]n Spenser’s view, absolute moral distinctions are justified by the dangerous world we find ourselves in” and that the poet’s adult home, “[s]ixteenth-century Ireland was the nearest site to England of the struggle for European and, increasingly, global hegemony between Catholicism and Protestantism”.22 Nonetheless, if, in one of E. K.’s glosses to “Maye” in The Shepheardes Calendar, the reader’s attention is directed towards “the false and faithlesse Papistes, to whom no credit is to be giuen, nor felowshippe to be vsed”,23 the antagonists of Spenser’s knights can be attributed with a remarkable range of identities linked with cultural foreignness. Duessa, for example, constitutes one of the most formidable adversaries presented in The Faerie Queene; and while she may be associated with the destructive practices of Archimago and the Church of Rome, she is also explicitly linked with a more distant, orientalized empire. Recalling also the Whore of Babylon at Revelation 17.4, Spenser’s readers encounter this mistress of deceit “clad in scarlot red, / Purfled with gold and pearle of rich assay, / And like a Persian mitre on her hed / She wore” (I.ii.13.2-5). The exoticised danger which Duessa represents is also in evidence later in the same Book where the questers arrive at the home of Lucifera. Here, the reader discovers that “[n]e Persia selfe, the nourse of pompous pride / Like euer saw” (I.iv.7.6-7). Persia, or Parthia, had since antiquity been viewed as a pre-eminent enemy to the political projects of Ancient Greece and Rome. However, a much more immediately perceived threat to Western Europe in the early modern period was that of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, which continued to enjoy great territorial gains around the Mediterranean basin and beyond from the sixteenth century onwards, notably (but not exclusively) under the reigns of Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-66) and Selim II (1566-1574). Symbolising the threat of this rapidly expanding empire, the unholy trinity of the Saracen warriors Sansfoy, Sansloy and Sansjoy present the Redcross Knight with repeated trials and tribulations in Book One. Moreover, later in the epic, in Book Five, when Arthur and Artegall are called upon to cross swords with Mercilla’s adversaries, the foe (“the proud Souldan”) is also evoked with all his “presumptuous cheare, / And countenance sublime and insolent, / [who] Sought onely slaughter and auengement” (V.viii.30.3-5), supported by his adviser Adicia (injustice).24
12Thus, Spenser’s evocation of the practices of shelter and healing should not be seen solely to engage in the polarised discourses widely exemplified in Catholic or Protestant polemical writings, but also in a broader concern with Christian witness and engagement evidenced in sixteenth-century ministry and print culture across national divides. Participating fully in the age’s spiritual enquiry into the understanding of healing, William Fisher’s A sermon preached at Paules crosse (1580) urged his Elizabethan congregation to reflect:
- 25 William Fisher, A sermon preached at Paules crosse, London, Thomas Dawson for Edward Aggas and Thom (...)
Who was euer so diseased in word, as Peter which denied his Maister with an othe, & yet Christ healed him? Who was euer so diseased in villainous deedes, as the thiefe vppon the Crosse, which was hanged for his robberyes, and yet Christ healed him? And all this is too teach vs that whether we be sick in thought, word or deede, hee is a Phisition able to heale vs. And what a shielde is this against the terrible assaultes of Desperation.25
- 26 Susannah Brietz Monta, “Saints, Legends, and Calendars”, in Andrew Escobedo (ed.), Edmund Spenser i (...)
- 27 For further discussion here, see Gregory Kneidel, “Church Controversy”, in A. Escobedo (ed.), Edmun (...)
- 28 John Henderson, The Renaissance Hospital: Healing the Body and Healing the Soul, New Haven, Yale Un (...)
13In addition, Susannah Brietz Monta has argued convincingly that readers should be on their guard when situating this epic poem in the complex and changeful landscape of Tudor England: “[Spenser’s] reformed sensibilities are combined with an interest in cultural salvage operations to recuperate and render usable England’s medieval and religious past. […] Spenser’s poem stresses the difficulty of identifying a valid model of sanctity in a post-Reformation world”.26 If, for example, at the close of Book Six, Sir Calidore “into a Monastere did light” and discovers the Blatant Beast “despoyling all with maine and might” (VI.xii.23.8-9), there are nonetheless notable instances elsewhere in the poem where the founding ideals of such communities appear to be endorsed.27 Thus, when turning to the House of Holiness in Book One, it is evident that the cultural construct of “an holy Hospitall” (I.x.36.1) as it developed in the early modern period, still retained, as John Henderson has highlighted, “the monastic model of cloister and infirmary hall”.28
- 29 F. Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England, op. cit., p. 261.
- 30 Henry Brinkelow, The Complaynt of Roderyck Mors, Sauoy [Strasbourg], Per Fransicum de Turona [Wolfg (...)
- 31 G. Kneidel, “Church Controversy”, art. cit., p. 35.
14Despite the formal dissolution of such institutions under the Henrician Reformation, the founding ideals of monasteries and convents remained key points of cultural reference in Tudor Britain. Indeed, Felicity Heal points out that “[w]hen the Henrician regime insisted in 1536 that the new owners of monastic property must maintain households and hospitality, it must have offered some faint hope to the reformers that their views were shared by those in power”.29 The reformist Henry Brinkelow drew attention in The Complaynt of Roderick Mors (1542?) to the horrors “[w]han as antichrist of Rome durst openly with out any vyser [vizor], walke vp and down thorow out Engla[n]d”. However, his reader was also reminded that, despite their failings, “the monkes […] kept hospytalyte, and helpyd their poore fryndes”; and the publication pondered at length “howe […] to employe the goodys and landys” of the Catholic Church, considering how the “[f]irst part of them may be distributed to the poore, as well as to poore maydens mariages and poore house holders, as to the blynd, sick, and lame”.30 The contrary motions at work in such debates have been persuasively highlighted by Gregory Kneidel who argues that “[f]or some, the lingering presence of desacralized monastic spaces evoked a nostalgia for England’s medieval past, but for others the continued use, as stipulated by the Act of Uniformity, of the remnants of medieval Catholicism became a focal point of church controversy”.31
15If Spenser’s knights find themselves repeatedly in environments riven by deadly antagonisms and the threat of mortal combat, the reader is never allowed to doubt the immediacy and relevance of such conflicted situations which are played out figuratively in the common experience of faithful Christians. The poetic narrator contends “how many perils doe enfold / The righteous man, to make him daily fall? / Were not that heauenly grace doth him vphold” (I.viii.1.1-3). Indeed, as we penetrate with the questers the deeply fractious world of The Faerie Queene, we are urged repeatedly to engage with the allegorical narratives of temptation, wrong-doing and penitence and to see them figured forth in our own spiritual journeyings. Thus, readers are constantly urged to compare their own beleaguered experience of this earthly life with those of the deluded, ensnared or naïve protagonists wandering far beyond Faeryland: seeing the Redcross Knight wrestling with a foul monster, the narrator exclaims, “God helpe the man so wrapt in Errours endlesse traine” (I.i.18.9). In such ways, Spenser’s epic engages tightly with pressing, but familiar crises of moral and spiritual interpretation and, importantly, the very intervention of heauenly grace is frequently communicated in narrative terms through symbolic, restorative acts of reception and healing.
- 32 F. Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England, op. cit., p. 1.
- 33 Ibid., p. 389.
- 34 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process. Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Revised Editi (...)
16Spenser’s recurring preoccupation in The Faerie Queene with the ways in which virtuous welcome, social care and Christian engagement in the wider community exist in relationships of interdependency is widely reproduced in reformist print culture. Heal has highlighted how “[t]he duty of generosity was proclaimed from the pulpit and urged in prescriptive literature. It was seen as one of the foundations of the moral economy, though a foundation that was constantly shaken by the failures of Englishmen as hosts”.32 In the context of this cultural debate, Heal also draws attention to “an aristocratic or élite ethos in which honour accrued to acts of beneficence and shame to forms of avarice; an associated ideology of generosity to all comers”.33 In so doing, she reinforces the contention of Norbert Elias earlier in the twentieth century that the humanist promotion of “the concept of civilité” emerging in the middle decades of the sixteenth century was particularly significant in such debates. Elias paid particular attention to Erasmus’s De civilitate morum puerilium (1530) as a humanist text which addressed “a theme that was ripe for discussion”: it offered a repertoire of practices and protocols to facilitate exemplary behaviours acknowledging leadership, obligation and care-giving. Elias argued for the rise of “a particular kind of social behaviour […] aristocratic self-consciousness and socially acceptable behaviour […] courtoisie […] courtesy […] cortezia […] a concept [that] was gradually developing which was to force the knightly-feudal concept of courtesy into the background”.34
- 35 A. Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet, op. cit., p. 1.
- 36 Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience. Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl, Oxford, Clarendon (...)
- 37 Anthea Hume argues in this case that the “saluage nation” functions “first of all as a delightful e (...)
17Anthea Hume acknowledged the gravitational pull which such ideas had upon Spenser throughout his career. However, she proposed that his poetic vision remained bi-focal in nature, yielding evidence both of “an enthusiasm for the humanist inheritance and a zealous, even militant Protestantism”.35 The sometimes contrary motions at work in this dual emphasis which Hume described may be identified in Spenser’s poetic accounts of reception and curative intervention and such tensions continue to exercise critical accounts of his writing. Brietz above indicated, for example, how Spenser might be seen to be involved in operations of “salvage” and Andrew Hadfield has focused attention on the polyvalency of the savage/salvage textual debate throughout the poet’s career: “A View [of the Present State of Ireland] opens with Eudoxus asking what courses can be taken for ‘reducinge the salvage nacion to better gouerment and Cyvilitye’ […] illustrating the continuity of such a pun between poetry and prose”.36 Thus, the act of reception is intimately bound up with questions of demonstrating one’s human/spiritual civilité and of investing in valuable exempla inherited from the past. Both the Spenserian figures of Una (I.vi) and Hellenore (III.x), for example, are received into the company of a “saluage nation” (I.vi.11.3). Interestingly, in the first instance, a metonymous reversal takes place and the lady is herself worshipped as a divinity by the satyrs and fauns (instead of being understood as part of a greater providential force at work).37 With regard to Hellenore, the errant wife remains in the host society, never to be heard of again.
- 38 For further discussion here, see, for example: Sarah J. Plant, “Spenser’s Praise of English Rites f (...)
- 39 In the context of the early modern discourses delineating the figure of the physician and the pract (...)
18In opposition to the interventions enacted by the godly (e.g. in the House of Holiness – I.x) who seek to imitate the demeanour of the immaculate healer Christ himself, Spenser can also problematise figures who seek to minister to the ailing. Book One, for example, offers up for consideration the figure of the pagan Aesculapius, chained in Hell, “sad” and “remedilesse” (I.v.36.7-8). In his many and various journeyings during this same Book, the protagonist Redcrosse is shown to be a knight errant in a number of ways. However, his narrative of experience remains dynamic, if morally changeful, as one canto succeeds the next. If the inexperienced knight is forced to do battle with vicious combatants, evil enchantments and mortal temptations, he nonetheless is graced with access to virtuous counsel, redemptive interventions and a spiritual potential to look for improvement. Thus, albeit beleaguered, he encounters the “siluer flood” of “[t]he well of life” (“full of vertues, and for med’cine good”) and experiences the transformational, baptismal force of this hallowed site: “For vnto life the dead it could restore / And guilt of sinfull crimes cleane wash away, / Those that with sicknesse were infected sore, / It could recure” (I.xi.29.4-5, 9). By way of contrast, in the figure of Aesculapius, we discover a condemned, largely inert figure of a man held fast in a cave: “[d]eepe, darke, vneasy, dolefull, comfortlesse” (I.xi.30.1-5).38 This forlorn character had displeased Olympus in daring to restore Hippolytus to life and is now abandoned to a dismal existence in a nether world (I.v.36.8-9). He lingers thus in the bowels of the Earth, striving continually to heal his own state, but all in vain: “Him selfe with salues to health for to restore, / And slake the heauenly fire, that raged euermore” (I.v.40.8-9). This emblem of human and spiritual failure is subsequently petitioned by “auncient Night” to minister to “the wounded [paynim] knight” Sansjoy (I.v.41.1, 3). Despite his “cunning hand […] / And all things els” (I.v.44.2, 3), the narrative attention of the epic moves on and both patient and surgeon are abandoned in the confines of Hell.39
Spenser’s Elfin Knight and the Challenges of Contrition and Convalescence
- 40 René Graziani, “The Faerie Queene, Book II”, in A. C. Hamilton et al (eds), The Spenser Encyclopedi (...)
19In what René Graziani has convincingly styled as the “Boschian symbolic landscape”40 of Book One, the sorely tested Redcrosse Knight is welcomed with Una into a truly exceptional place of convalescence and healing: the House of Holiness (I.x). Having earlier snatched a knife from the hand of Redcrosse in the Cave of Despair (I.ix), Una now accompanies the knight to a most necessary place of repose: the “auntient house” of Holiness is “[r]enowmd throughout the world for sacred lore, / And pure vnspotted life” (1.x.3.1-3).
20Here, the community is governed by Dame Cælia (“a matrone graue and hore” – I.x.3.5), supported by the ministrations of her daughters Fidelia, Speranza and Charissa; and Spenser’s travellers welcome the offer of therapeutic interventions for ailing bodies and souls. Nonetheless, Darryl J. Gless cautions justly that
- 41 D. J. Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser, op. cit., p. 146, 147. Douglas Brooks-Davies a (...)
[i]t is probably best to pause at the threshold of the House of Holiness to notice how insistently its features and presentation invite readers to construct a variety of potentially incompatible meanings. […] rewriting features of the Roman Catholic past. […] features that make the House resemble an exemplary monastic institution […] [and] something more like an aristocratic household.41
- 42 For further discussion concerning the role of female interventions in the field of early modern med (...)
21Spenser’s community remains wholly devoted to relieving “the needs / Of wretched soules, and help[ing] the helpelesse pore”. The invitation to convalesce which the questers accept is designed to address both their physical and spiritual needs and their sojourn unfolds within a settlement wholly given over to “doing good and godly deedes” (1.x.3.5-8).42 Significantly, the House’s policies of reception are governed by highly selective (read, moral and religious) strictures, for its door remains “fast lockt […] [and] warely watched night and day, / For feare of many foes”. Nonetheless, for Spenser’s elect travellers, the agèd porter Humiltá swiftly yields access to the “streight & narrow” way ahead (Luke 13.24) (1.x.5.1-9). “Greeted” and “enterteynd […] With all the court’sies” in this haven of physical and spiritual repose, Una and Redcrosse are “refresht with due repast” and guided to their chambers by the “groom” Obedience (1.x.11.6-9; 1.x.18.2; 1.x.17.6-9).
- 43 See, for example: Carol V. Kaske, “Spenser and the Bible”, in Colin A. McCabe (ed.), The Oxford Han (...)
22In her ground-breaking studies of Spenser’s epic, Carol V. Kaske justly underlined the ways in which the sixteenth century inherited deeply embedded cultural practices of interpretation regarding allegorical texts: how the literal rendering of figures and events in textual intrigues in The Faerie Queene inevitably gave rise in scholarly minds to moral, theological and eschatological modes of exegesis.43 As may be witnessed above in the allegorical naming of the matriarchs of the House of Holiness, the painful journeying of Holiness (Redcrosse) towards spiritual healing in Book One is framed in narrative terms by explicit symbolic coding. F. D Hoeniger stressed more broadly in his account of The Faerie Queene that Spenser’s evocations of medical practice remain significant throughout his career in that they generate a rich discourse of religious symbolism, rather than demonstrating a detailed acquaintance with early modern thinking in this area:
- 44 See F. D. Hoeniger, “Medicine”, in A. C. Hamilton et al (eds), The Spenser Encyclopedia, op. cit., (...)
there are no clear indications that Spenser read any of the works by classical, medieval or contemporary medical authorities […] Among the major poets and other literary writers of the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, Spenser may well be the one who least reflects the variety of diseases then known, their chief symptoms, or how they were understood.44
23In the instance of the House of Holiness, the staging of restorative hospitality is notably extended beyond the patient’s purely physical needs when Una requests that Redcrosse receive “celestiall discipline” in the schoolhouse in order to repair the damage wrought by “sinfull horror […] in wounded hart”: the latter procedure is assisted by the intervention of “a Leach”, or surgeon, named Patience (1.x.18.8; 1.x.23.3-7). Andrew Hadfield argues convincingly in this context that
- 45 See A. Hadfield, Edmund Spenser. A Life, op. cit., p. 259-260.
[t]he House of Holiness in which the knight is restored to physical and spiritual health in Book I, canto x, shows him passing through the traditional stages of penance, being ‘exorcised, shriven, and ma[king] a confession of faith’ before baptism in the Well of Life, all elements of traditional worship in England before the Reformation.45
- 46 In this particular discussion, Campana draws parallels between the treatment of Redcrosse in the Ho (...)
24Indeed, Joseph Campana develops this particular account of Redcrosse’s encounter with “bitter Penance with an yron whip” (I.x.27.1), arguing that the protagonist’s encounters with Penance, Remorse and Repentance should not only be understood as “allegorical operations that aim at rendering the dark matter of the body transparent and obedient”, but as an intermingling of “a Catholic rhetoric of penance with the discourse of torture common to accounts of martyrdom so effectively deployed by English Protestants”.46
- 47 Jamie Ferguson, “The Bible and Biblical Hermeneutics”, in A. Escobedo (ed.), Edmund Spenser in Cont (...)
- 48 In the context of such discussion, Campana makes the telling point that “Spenser makes vulnerabilit (...)
- 49 Carol V. Kaske, Spenser and Biblical Poetics, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1999, p. 83. Indeed (...)
25More generally, the events being symbolically orchestrated at the House of Holiness not only demonstrate the desperately ailing state to which the protagonist has now been reduced, but also his enduring responsiveness to redemptive intervention. In this context, Jamie Ferguson has underlined that “[u]nlike Despair, Cælia’s community (most notably Fidelia) offers Redcrosse the sacred book as a whole […] [not just the] Old Testament law alone”.47 The earlier, desperate encounter in the Cave of Despair with its temptation to commit suicide had not only radically enfeebled the questing knight, but rendered him even more in need of divine succour. The frail spirit of the protagonist is now shown to be fully receptive to the attention and instruction of his new hosts.48 In such ways, we are asked to bear witness how bodies (most especially those of Spenser’s principal questers), wasted and compromised through their encounters with the forces of destruction, nonetheless retain through the power of divine grace the potential to be restored to physical and spiritual health. However, as Kaske highlighted, both Spenser’s protagonist and his reader are engaged in an arduous procedure of constant interrogation and re-evaluation. If, as was witnessed above, the monastic ideals of sheltering the needy and the martyrological discourses of the supremely suffering human subject are reviewed and re-inflected in a number of different ways as The Faerie Queene unfolds, the same holds true when we focus on the figure of the mistress of the House of Holiness. Kaske drew attention to the ways in which the demonisation of the religious practices of prayer beads and fasting, for example, in the company of the villainous Archimago (Chief Practiser of Dark Arts/Hypocrisy), Corceca (Blind-heart) and her daughter Abessa in the earlier cantos of Book One is now revisited in this new environment: “we find to our surprise that beads are now good. Dame Coelia, the mistress, spends ‘All night […] in bidding of her bedes’ (I.x.3.8-9)”.49 Thus, Spenser’s readers (like the Redcrosse knight) are forcefully reminded that the utmost vigilance and sensitivity are required to navigate successfully through this perilous landscape inhabited by warring communities.
- 50 Jürgen Pieters, Literature and Consolation. Fictions of Comfort, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Pr (...)
- 51 Cited at J. Pieters, Literature and Consolation, op. cit., p. 23.
- 52 R. Greenham, A most sweete and assured comfort, op. cit., sig. C7v.
- 53 J. Campana, The Pain of Reformation, op. cit., p. 34.
26If Ferguson above underlined the role of the Word or logos in the operations being effected in the House of Holiness, it is apparent more broadly in Spenser’s narratives of ailing bodies and spiritual failure that The Faerie Queene can also direct attention specifically to the role which language itself has to play in remedial interventions. In his own wide-ranging discussion of the depiction of healing and solace in literary writing down the ages, Jürgen Pieters has given prominence to the millennia-old tradition of the “logos paramuthètikos: the philosophical discourse of consolation that brings together a series of arguments that those who have been afflicted with considerable sadness can use in order to arrive at a new perspective that alleviates or even drives away that sadness”.50 This tradition, which has a point of origin in the West in the writings of Homer, continued to have increasing purchase on philosophical theorizing in antiquity. In the Tusculan Disputations, for example, Cicero had stressed that in order to heal the patient, the comforter must “do away with distress root and branch, or allay it, or diminish it as far as possible, or stop its progress and not allow it to extend further, or to divert it elsewhere”.51 By the early modern period, the philosophical and religious promotion of the ideal Christian Humanist scholar was strategically supported by such emphases. Indeed, Greenham urged readers in his tract of most sweete and assured comfort, “let vs shew what way is to be vsed to keepe vs from this wound of the spirit. It is the vse of Phisicke, as to cure vs of diseases when wee are faln into them; so to preserue vs from sicknes before it hath taken hold of vs: it is the power of the Word”.52 In the humanist quest for moral and spiritual improvement invested in the power of the divine logos, much time and energy was devoted to the importance not only of learning, but of mentoring and counselling. It is this discourse which finds its echo in the sojourn of the ailing Redcrosse Knight and the Lady Una at the House of Holiness, where the attentive labours of greeting and receiving signify the expression of God-given virtue. Initially, amongst the members of the assembled household, the new arrivals meet the franklin Zele (“in his speeches and behaueour hee/Did labour liuely to expresse the same”) and Fidelia (“she fast did hold / A booke that was both signd and seald with blood”). Una subsequently asks Fidelia “of her heuenly learning […] [Redcrosse] might taste, / And heare the wisedom of her wordes diuine”: “her sacred Booke, with blood ywritt, / That none could reade, except she did them teach […] / And heauenly documents thereout did preach […] / For she was hable, with her wordes to kill, / And rayse againe to life the hart, that she did thrill” (I.x.6.6-8; I.x.13.7-9; I.x.18.5-6; I.x.19.1-2, 4, 8-9). When considering such ministrations in Spenser’s epic, the reader’s attention is repeatedly deflected away from the ailing subject’s body to the allegorical figuration of spiritual renewal. Indeed, as Joseph Campana argues in his account of Spenser’s post-Reformation epic, “[a]s visual and literary representations of the suffering Christ declined in tandem with an increasing discomfort with the vulnerability of Christ, Spenser sought a way of returning to representation the ethical value of conveying and responding to the pain of others”. 53
- 54 A. Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet, op. cit., p. 101.
- 55 Translated from 1563 prefatory address “Ad Doctum Lectorem”, cited at David Loades (ed.), John Foxe (...)
27The intricate symbolism of the sacred “auntient house” of Holiness continues when the guests retreat further within its recesses to the “holy Hospitall”, founded by Charissa and staffed by a company of “seuen Bead-men”. Here, the day is spent in “seruice of high heauens king” and the “gates to all were open euermore”. Pre-eminent among the residents is a “Guardian and Steward”, tasked with overseeing the provision of “entertainement / And lodging, vnto all that came, and went” – “for Gods sake his dewty was to entertaine” (1.x.36.1-6, 1.x.37.3-9). In these endeavours, he is assisted by: the Alm[o]ner who is devoted to “a worke of grace”, namely “the hungry for to feed, / And th[ir]sty giue to drinke”; a third who attends to the garments with which “bare wretched wights he dayly clad, / The images of God in earthly clay”; the fourth concerns himself with the deliverance of prisoners; the fifth comforts the sick and dying; the sixth attends to the services accorded to the dead; and the seventh takes care of “the tender Orphans of the dead/And wydowes ayd” (1.x.38-43). Hume convincingly identifies here “the profoundly traditional nature of the materials Spenser employs: the seven Corporal Works of Mercy are a patristic and mediaeval conception […] such a mingling of traditional and Protestant materials is not in fact surprising but characteristic”.54 Indeed, more generally, despite the Reformists’ declared aims to distance themselves from Catholic practices, to affirm continuities with the Early Church and to vilify departures from their own cultures of worship, we find in Spenser’s epic (and in examples more widely from the Elizabethan religious settlement itself) a strikingly recursive motion towards shadowing institutional and cultural operations in evidence across Catholic Europe. One of the leading Elizabethan theologians, John Foxe, had sought vigorously to dissociate his own Reformist martyrology, The Acts and Monuments (1st version pub. in Latin 1554) from the enormously popular thirteenth-century Catholic hagiography Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine, with its emphasis upon miracles, revelations and visions: “I wish this history were not so true as it is, were really like their golden legend and their other lying stories. These miseries were inflicted by you, not feigned by me; we have more witness to them than we would choose”.55 In the event, Foxe’s endeavours did not prove altogether successful with his narratives in the Acts and Monuments of the tremendous sacrifices and on occasion, veneration for the relics of the Protestant godly. Similarly, Spenser peoples his epic with Catholic antagonists of all shapes and sizes and yet, in the instance the House of Holiness, The Faerie Queene can figure forth a benign locus of healing and shelter recalling paradigms established by medieval monastic ideals of self-abnegation, retreat and care of the sick.
- 56 Sheila T. Cavanagh, Wanton Eyes & Chaste Desires. Female Sexuality in “The Faerie Queene”, Blooming (...)
28Strikingly, as we have seen, the practices and rituals of this particular edifice are governed by a markedly female authority. In this context, Sheila T. Cavanagh contends convincingly that Spenser’s readers are urged to attend to the gendered politics at work in the epic’s depiction of patrons, guardians, counsellors, healers: “Unlike male seers, such as Merlin, who pointedly provide only limited information, these women [of the House of Holiness] with special knowledge offer all they possess, as Fidelia’s lessons to Red Crosse indicate: ‘She vnto him disclosed euery wit’ (I.x.19.3)”.56 While the personnel servicing Dame Caelia’s domain is shown to be extensive, Spenser’s poetic narrative is at pains to emphasise the succession of female figures overseeing the government of the House of Holiness and, more particularly, the curative treatment of Redcrosse himself. The stress upon a redemptive grace extended to the patient “[i]n word and deede” (I.x.7.4) is notably articulated in the account of Charissa’s offering instruction to the “Elfin knight” concerning in the “godly worke of Almes and charitee” (1.x.45.4). As canto 10 unfolds, Spenser’s reader is asked in addition to consider virtuous female government in two different locations. Drawing partially upon Augustinian paradigms from De civitate dei, Spenser’s narrative has the Redcrosse Knight compare the Faerie Queene’s, Gloriana’s, city, Cleopolis or City of Fame, to the House of Holiness. Even though a civitas terrena, Cleopolis is found to excel all others in “earthly frame” with its monarch “heauenly borne”, while the House of Holiness is located on a distinctively higher plane of existence. The links between the two cities, however, are never in doubt in Spenser’s cosmology and through his endeavours the knightly protagonist Redcrosse will be welcomed into the ranks of subjects in both realms. Indeed, in due course, fortified and restored by his experiences in Caelia’s domain, Redcrosse sets out on his “painefull pilgrimage / To yonder same Hierusalem […] Where is for [him] ordaind a blessed end”: indeed, a destiny awaits in which he “Saint George shalt called bee, / Saint George of mery England, the signe of victoree” (1.x.59.2,9; 1.x.61.3-9). As Book One draws to its close, this highly ritualised account of succour and healing offered to the traumatised Christian soul of the protagonist may usefully be placed in counterpoint with the more festive welcome and rejoicing orchestrated subsequently to mark the release of Una’s, namely our, first parents, Adam and Eve (I.vii.43-44). In this way, a familiar paradigm is figured forth as the “royall Pere” pays ample tribute to the “deadly daungers” encountered by Redcrosse and resolves “[l]et vs deuize of ease and euerlasting rest” (1.xii.17.1, 6, 9).
Restorative Intervention and The Faerie Queene
- 57 M. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England, op. cit. p. 50.
29The strenuous attentions focused on hosting, healing and convalescence afforded to Una and Redcrosse in Book One (the Book of Holiness) are renewed in a host of different ways in later books of The Faerie Queene. While there are clear continuities in the allegorical codings of reception between the locations related in subsequent Books of the epic and those discussed above at Dame Caelia’s residence, Spenser pursues his enquiry into the sheltering of the sick in innovative directions as the epic unfolds, staging acts of greeting, comfort and reparative care in a variety of moral, religious and human landscapes. This is the case, for example, in Book Two, the Book of Temperance. In Alma’s (the soul’s) castle, Guyon, Redcrosse and Arthur are received by the hostess (“like a virgin Queene most bright”) who “to her guestes doth bounteous banket dight, / Attempred goodly well for health and for delight” (2.xi.1.6, 8-9). Here, in this community, there is a dual emphasis upon self-government and the virtuous desire to please. Michael Schoenfeldt justly underlines that Alma’s castle is “a place of pleasure as well as discipline, and demonstrates remarkable hospitality for a place under constant siege, once its doors are finally opened”.57 Indeed, at the close of canto 11, the extension of hospitality transforms into the attentive dispensing of recuperative care. At this point in the narrative, the combat-weary Arthur, now victorious (with the assistance of Timias) over Alma’s antagonist, Maleger, is welcomed on his return to the castle:
Where many Groomes and Squyres ready were,
To take him from his steed full tenderly,
And eke the fairest Alma mett him there
With balme and wine and costly spicery,
To comfort him in his infirmity;
Eftesoones shee causd him vp to be conuayd,
And of his armes despoyled easily,
In sumptuous bed shee made him to be layd,
And al the while his wounds were dressing, by him stayd. (2.xi.49)
30The “cruell Capitaine” Maleger (evil disease), supported by “two wicked Hags” Impatience and Impotence, constitutes one of the prime adversaries of good measure and discipline in Spenser’s epic (II.ix.15.3; II.xi.23.2). His forces of the unruly passions are most strategically located here in this “Book of Temperance” where he emerges as the arch-foe.
- 58 Elizabeth Heale, The Faerie Queene: A Reader’s Guide, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, (...)
31If Maleger is “[f]lesh without blood, a person without spright” (II.xi.40.4), Arthur’s frail humanity at the close of this combat is not in doubt: “Through losse of blood, which from his wounds did bleed / That he began to faint, and life decay” (II.xi.48.5-6). At the opening of the following Book III, the Book of Chastity, attention is returned to the “Briton Prince” and the “Faery knight” Guyon being cared for at Alma’s castle (III.i.1.1). The generosity of the chatelaine Alma knows no bounds as she presses her guests to accept “lenger soiourne and abode”, but the questers set out again, seemingly miraculously “[h]auing their weary limbes to perfect plight/Restord, and sory wounds right well recur’d” on account of the attentive ministrations of the castle household (III.i.1.6, 3-4). As Elizabeth Heale underlines, “[f]ortified by the temperate hospitality of Alma and the ‘brave ensamples’ of the ‘Antiquitie of Faerie’, Guyon departs with the Palmer to fulfil his quest”.58
32It is in such ways that The Faerie Queene periodically furnishes the reader with accounts of warm reception and care-giving. Indeed, the later Book Six reinvests in these earlier narrative emphases which remain thematic to the epic, encouraging the reader to identify an organic unity in all the many and various textual adventures – adventures in which the questers submit to various forms of injury and yet are brought to envisage the possibility of renewal through the intervention of heavenly grace. Book Six, the “Book of Courtesy”, which insists that “gentle bloud will gentle manners breed” (VI.iii.2.2), includes the account of how the wounded knight Aladine and his mistress Priscilla are conveyed by Sir Calidore’s company to the victim’s father’s, Aldus’, castle. Here, we discover that the ageing patriarch had been a distinguished knight himself in his youth and remains “courteous still to euery wight” (VI.iii.3.5). Indeed,
[…] when he saw his sonne so ill bedight,
With bleeding wounds, brought home vpon a Beare
By a faire Lady, and a straunger Knight,
Was inly touched with compassion deare. (6.iii.4.1-4)
33Cognizant of his obligations as host to the company of Sir Calidore, Aldus extends fine hospitality to his guests: Aldus “by all meanes did assay, / To make [his guests] both as merry as he may” (VI.iii.9.4-5). Meanwhile, Priscilla “by her wounded loue did watch all night” and her unstinting devotion at his bedside is itself the instrument through which Aladine’s healing is effected: “with her teares his wounds did wash and steepe. / So well she washt them, and so well she watcht him, / That of the deadly swound, in which full deepe / He drenched was, she at the length dispacht him” (VI.iii.10.3, 5-8).
34This emphasis upon reception and healing is shortly after played out again in the epic’s story-telling when other Spenserian figures find themselves in a wooded landscape, thus beyond the secure confines of human settlement. In this instance, an agent of healing is supported in his offices with the renewing energies of the forest – and yet, here again, the reader is asked to attend to curative intervention focused on the recovery of well-being, both in terms of body and soul. The maiden Serena is seized by the Blatant Beast. Ultimately, the assailant seeks flight from combat with Calepine and Serena is revealed “[a]ll in gore bloud there tumbled on the ground, / Hauing both sides through grypt with grisly wound” (VI.iii.27.4-5). Subsequently, the wicked Turpine attacks the “most courteous knight” Sir Calepine (VI.iv.1.6). Rather ungallantly, Calepine seeks protection “[b]ehinde his Ladies back” (VI.iii.49.6), but the enraged Turpine (more “like a wilde goat” than a courteous knight VI.iii.49.3) is not to be put off. The villain finally lunges successfully at the unarmed Calepine (“with his spere/[Turpine] Strooke through his shoulder, that the blood ensew’d / In great abondance”, VI.iii.50.6-8) and the latter “saw his life powrd forth dispiteously” (VI.iii.51.4). Nonetheless, a passer-by in the forest, a “saluage man”, is “enmoued” by the spectacle and forces this ruthless foe to flee: despite the man’s inexperience in the arts of war, “[h]e was invulnerable made by Magicke leare” (VI.iv.3.1, 4; 4.9). This “wyld man” (VI.iv.11.1) now quickly hunts about to find “a certaine herbe” (6.iv.12.6) to heal his new-found patients: “The iuyce whereof into [Calepine’s] wound he wrought, / And stopt the bleeding straight” (VI.iv.12.8-9). These “unacquainted guests” (6.iv.14.1), ignorant of their host’s identity, are then led to his forest retreat: “a hollow glade, / Couered with mossie shrubs” (VI.iv.13.5-6). Here, they are offered mossy beds and “the frutes of the forrest was their feast” (VI.iv.14.6): “Yet howsoeuer base and meane it were, / They tooke it well, and thanked God for all” (VI.iv.15.1-2). Significantly, in this epic romance, while the “wyld man” is able to heal the knight’s wound, for “that same Ladies hurts no herbe he found, / Which could redresse, for it was inwardly vnsound” (VI.iv.16.8-9).
Concluding Thoughts
- 59 R. Greenham, A most sweete and assured comfort, op. cit., sig. A4r.
Many are the calamities that sinne imposeth vpon the wicked: but aboue all other plagues, the wound of Conscience is most heauie […] The swetest of sinnes plesure is not without a sharp sting, that piercing the Conscience, beginneth hell in the harts of the vngodlie, and prepareth Gods Children to seeke heauen by vnfained repentance. I can not here number all of either sort the Scripture mentioneth: I wil onely touch some.59
- 60 In this context, see D. J. Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser, op. cit., p. 45.
35Seeking to appreciate the multifarious ways in which the human subject, body and soul, may be assailed by the devious means of the forces of temptation, Greenham’s most sweete and assured comfort (1595) acknowledged at the outset the impossibility of exhausting its chosen subject in the nearly two hundred pages which followed. Similar limitations present themselves when considering the narratives of spiritual healing and physical recovery in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene: no selection of intrigues can ever offer a comprehensive account of the epic’s far-reaching enquiries in this domain. Nonetheless, the present discussion has sought to demonstrate the rich varietas of Spenser’s artistic undertaking in this area, ranging from markedly architectural landscapes to explicitly pastoral ones and across narratives involving Protestant, Catholic and non-Christian emphases and depictions, examining changing configurations of gender expectation and chivalric ideals of elite behaviour. As has been witnessed, Spenser’s readers repeatedly find that the commitment to heal warrants acts of reception and strategic withdrawal to institutional or household settings or, indeed, to locations of natural seclusion – thus bringing into being an oft-repeated narrative mechanism of dislocation, temptation, relocation and renewal for protagonists.60
36In fact, the age’s broader theological debate in which divine goodness is expressed through curative intervention with the instrument of human agency continued to be a feature Elizabethan and Jacobean print culture throughout Spenser’s life and beyond. In The sermon preached at the Crosse (1607), for example, William Crashaw drew attention to the figure of the individual committed to care of the ailing (both physical and spiritual):
- 61 William Crashaw, The sermon preached at the Crosse, Feb. xiiii 1607, London: H. L. for Mathew Lowne (...)
the whole shyre and parish shall fare the better by one good man dwelling among them […] hee considers what that people wants, what is their disease, what he may do to heal them, or any way to help them […] he leaues behinde him signes of his goodnesse, monuments of his holinesse61
In early modern cultural debate, scenes of restorative intervention, like those treated in this discussion, ultimately become meditations on human and spiritual communion. If, in Spenser’s epic, these experiences are primarily reserved for protagonists capable of Christian acts of penitent submission, as has been indicated in excerpted publications from the period, the engagement of care-giving to those sick in body and soul remained more broadly an integral part of spiritual witness on the part of the faithful.
Notes
1 William Webbe, A Discourse of English Poetrie, London, John Charlewood for Robert Walley, 1586, sig. E1r-v.
2 Ibid., sig. E1v. For discussion of the ways in which humanists considered earlier medieval romances, early modern Italian epic romances and the productive ways in which Spenser may be placed in dialogue with them, see Andrew King, “The Faerie Queene” and Middle English Romance. The Matter of Just Memory, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, esp. p. 7, 105, 189.
3 Epigram 64: “Of Spencers Faiery Queene”, in Thomas Freeman, Rubbe, and a great cast Epigrams, London, Nicholas O[a]kes, 1614, sig. I3r.
4 All references from Spenser’s epic are taken from Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al, Harlow, Pearson, 2001 and henceforth rendered in the discussion as: Book. Canto. Stanza. Line(s). In this instance: 1 (Prol.).1.1.9.
5 Sir Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, London, John Windet for William Ponsonbie, 1590, sig. D3r.
6 See: Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990; Julia Reinhard Lupton, Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2018; David B. Goldstein, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013; Judith Still, Enlightenment Hospitality. Cannibals, Harems and Adoption, Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, 2011.
7 See: Georgia Ronan Crampton, The Condition of Creatures: Suffering and Action in Chaucer and Spenser, New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1974; Marion Wells, The Secret Wound: Love-Melancholy and Early Modern Romance, Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 2007; Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England. Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999; Joseph Campana, The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity, New York, Fordham University Press, 2012.
8 F. David Hoeniger describes this episode as “Spenser’s most detailed description of leechcraft or methods of therapy”. He adds: “Belphoebe with her expertise in herbs and general therapy cures Timias of the deep wound in his thigh but ironically infects his heart with love”. See “Medicine”, in A. C. Hamilton et al (eds), The Spenser Encyclopedia, Toronto/London, University of Toronto Press/Routledge, 1990, p. 460-464 (esp. p. 463).
9 Robert M. Rakoff, “Ideology in Everyday Life – The Meaning of the House”, Politics and Society, 7, 1977, p. 85-104, here p. 94.
10 Richard Greenham, A most sweete and assured comfort for all those that are afflicted in conscience, or troubled in minde, London, John Danter for William Jones, 1595, sig. A4r.
11 Richard Chamberlain, Radical Spenser. Pastoral, Politics and the New Aestheticism, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2005, p. 59, 62, 65.
12 Andrew Pettegree underlines that “Lord Burghley and his son Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury […] [both] practised pragmatic medicine”. See The Book in the Renaissance, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2010, p. 298, 317.
13 All quotations from the Geneva Bible are taken from: The Bible and Holy Scriptures conteyned in the Olde and Newe Testament. Translated according to the Ebrue and Greke […], Geneva, Rouland Hall, 1560.
14 “The Epistle Dedicatorie”, in John Banister, A needefull, new, and necessarie treatise of Chyrurgerie […], London, Thomas Marshe, 1575, sig. *viir.
15 “May”, ll. 164-165. See Edmund Spenser, The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard A. McCabe, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1999, p. 77.
16 Andrew Boord, The breuiarie of health […], London, Thomas East, 1587, sig. D5r.
17 In terms of the errant nature of Spenser’s protagonists in this epic, Susanne L. Wofford contends convincingly that “[i]nstead of royal or divine or metropolitan centre, the poem consistently presents a periphery, with knights wandering almost as if in exile in forests and plains, far from the civic and religious centre of the plot or its symbols”. See “The Faerie Queene, Books I-III”, in Andrew Hadfield (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 106-123, here p. 107.
18 Claire McEachern, “Spenser and Religion”, in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Spenser, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 30-47, here p. 30.
19 Ibid., p. 30.
20 William Turner, A new booke of spirituall physic, Emden, Egidius van der Erve, 1555, p. 71.
21 John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, London, John Day, 1583, p. 154. In this context, see Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser. A Life, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, esp. p. 257.
22 Gary Waller, Edmund Spenser: A Literary Life, Basingstoke, MacMillan, 1994, p. 10, 56.
23 “Maye”, gloss 174. See E. Spenser, The Shorter Poems, op. cit., p. 84.
24 For further discussion here, see, for example: Anthea Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 81; A. Hadfield, Edmund Spenser. A Life, op. cit., p. 259.
25 William Fisher, A sermon preached at Paules crosse, London, Thomas Dawson for Edward Aggas and Thomas Chare [?], 1580, sig. B8v-C1r.
26 Susannah Brietz Monta, “Saints, Legends, and Calendars”, in Andrew Escobedo (ed.), Edmund Spenser in Context, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017, p. 313-322, here p. 313, 318.
27 For further discussion here, see Gregory Kneidel, “Church Controversy”, in A. Escobedo (ed.), Edmund Spenser in Context, op. cit., 2017, p. 33-41, esp. p. 35.
28 John Henderson, The Renaissance Hospital: Healing the Body and Healing the Soul, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006, p. 86.
29 F. Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England, op. cit., p. 261.
30 Henry Brinkelow, The Complaynt of Roderyck Mors, Sauoy [Strasbourg], Per Fransicum de Turona [Wolfgang Köpfel], 1542?, sig. D3r, D4v, F2r.
31 G. Kneidel, “Church Controversy”, art. cit., p. 35.
32 F. Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England, op. cit., p. 1.
33 Ibid., p. 389.
34 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process. Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Revised Edition), trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell, Oxford, Blackwell, 2000, p. 47, 52, 54, 61.
35 A. Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet, op. cit., p. 1.
36 Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience. Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997, p. 134, see also p. 130-134.
37 Anthea Hume argues in this case that the “saluage nation” functions “first of all as a delightful example of the unexpected ways in which Eternal Providence can come to the rescue of a lady in distress, and secondly demonstrate the characteristic response of savage people to religion. […] They possess a religious instinct, but all too soon it passes over into idolatry”. See Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet, op. cit., p. 88. In this context, see also Darryl J. Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 108.
38 For further discussion here, see, for example: Sarah J. Plant, “Spenser’s Praise of English Rites for the Sick and Dying”, Sixteenth Century Journal, 32.2, 2001, p. 403-420.
39 In the context of the early modern discourses delineating the figure of the physician and the practice of healing, see, for example: John Henderson, The Renaissance Hospital. Healing the Body and Healing the Soul, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006; Jennifer C. Vaught (ed.), Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England, Burlington VT, Ashgate, 2010.
40 René Graziani, “The Faerie Queene, Book II”, in A. C. Hamilton et al (eds), The Spenser Encyclopedia, op. cit., p. 263-270, here p. 264.
41 D. J. Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser, op. cit., p. 146, 147. Douglas Brooks-Davies also stresses the numerological and strategic nature of the siting of Spenser’s House in the tenth canto with that number being primarily associated with completion and the Holy Commandments. See Douglas Brooks-Davies, “The Faerie Queene, Book 1”, in A. C. Hamilton et al (eds), The Spenser Encyclopedia, op. cit., p. 259-63, here p. 262. John N. King is also persuasive in arguing for us to pause to reflect upon the complex situation unfolding in this poetic location where the protagonist can be understood both as pilgrim knight and as a figuration of St. George: “[his] status is problematic, however, because Protestants rejected veneration of the saints as a medieval tradition lacking in biblical foundation. When he arrives at the House of Holiness, Dame Caelia’s expression of surprise, ‘Strange thing it is an errant knight to see/Here in this place’ (I.x.10), calls attention to an uneasy fusion of quest romance with saint’s life”. See John N. King, “Spenser’s Religion”, in Andrew Hadfield (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, op. cit., p. 200-216, here p. 209.
42 For further discussion concerning the role of female interventions in the field of early modern medicine, see, for example: Mary E. Fissell, “Women, Health, and Healing in Early Modern Europe”, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 82.1, 2008, p. 1-17.
43 See, for example: Carol V. Kaske, “Spenser and the Bible”, in Colin A. McCabe (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 485-502.
44 See F. D. Hoeniger, “Medicine”, in A. C. Hamilton et al (eds), The Spenser Encyclopedia, op. cit., p. 460, 462.
45 See A. Hadfield, Edmund Spenser. A Life, op. cit., p. 259-260.
46 In this particular discussion, Campana draws parallels between the treatment of Redcrosse in the House of Holiness and the dungeon of Orgoglio in Book One. See J. Campana, The Pain of Reformation, op. cit., p. 69.
47 Jamie Ferguson, “The Bible and Biblical Hermeneutics”, in A. Escobedo (ed.), Edmund Spenser in Context, op. cit., p. 130-138, here p. 136. Paola Baseotto contextualises this episode in the Cave further in terms of Reformation theology, underlining that “[n]either Calvin nor the Anglican theologians, however, subscribed to Luther’s exhortations to Christians to venture ‘even to the abyss of despair’. While they allowed that the experience of despair is a pre-requisite to conversion, they warned that venturing as far as the ‘abyss of despair’ entails fatal risks, as one may not come out again”. See “Disdeining life, desiring leaue to die”. Spenser and the Psychology of Despair, Stuttgart, Ibidem-Verlag, 2008, p. 40.
48 In the context of such discussion, Campana makes the telling point that “Spenser makes vulnerability central to his idea of virtue, which he understands in a root sense as being related to manliness. Masculinity, or manliness, must then be reformed to accommodate vulnerability and an openness to the pain of others.” See The Pain of Reformation, op. cit., p. 1.
49 Carol V. Kaske, Spenser and Biblical Poetics, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1999, p. 83. Indeed, Beth Quitslund argues that the figure of Abessa, for example, is made to represent “a greedy, indolent monastic system […] that drains the Church’s ability to minister worship and charity”. See Beth Quitslund, “Protestant Theology and Devotion”, in A. Escobedo (ed.), Edmund Spenser in Context, op. cit., 2017, p. 291-300, here p. 299.
50 Jürgen Pieters, Literature and Consolation. Fictions of Comfort, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2021, p. 31.
51 Cited at J. Pieters, Literature and Consolation, op. cit., p. 23.
52 R. Greenham, A most sweete and assured comfort, op. cit., sig. C7v.
53 J. Campana, The Pain of Reformation, op. cit., p. 34.
54 A. Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet, op. cit., p. 101.
55 Translated from 1563 prefatory address “Ad Doctum Lectorem”, cited at David Loades (ed.), John Foxe and the English Reformation, Aldershot, Scolar Press, 1997, p. 210. For further discussion here, see Andrew Hiscock, Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011.
56 Sheila T. Cavanagh, Wanton Eyes & Chaste Desires. Female Sexuality in “The Faerie Queene”, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 32.
57 M. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England, op. cit. p. 50.
58 Elizabeth Heale, The Faerie Queene: A Reader’s Guide, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 67.
59 R. Greenham, A most sweete and assured comfort, op. cit., sig. A4r.
60 In this context, see D. J. Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser, op. cit., p. 45.
61 William Crashaw, The sermon preached at the Crosse, Feb. xiiii 1607, London: H. L. for Mathew Lownes, 1609, p. 9-10.
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Andrew Hiscock, « “In wounded hart”: Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the Emergency of Healing », Études Épistémè [En ligne], 46 | 2024, mis en ligne le 15 mars 2025, consulté le 14 mai 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/20217 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13juq
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