Spenser’s Forms of History

Es, Bart van

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199249701.001.0001

Cited by 28 publications

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“…41 Van Es writes that Ruines is about "the failure to record history itself," but Alban's absent presence in the poem seems less a comment on what has been accidentally omitted from history's annals than on what Elizabethan historians like Foxe deliberately sought to efface. 42 Alban, as we have seen, was a significant figure in the new protestant history of post-Reformation England. Foxe regards him as Britain's first protoprotestant saint, and celebrates his witnessing of a faith rewritten from the perspective of the Elizabethan church.…”

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“…Bart van Es approaches Spenser's poem as a meditation on the merits of preserving history, whereas Carl Rasmussen and Deborah Cartmell both argue that the poem iconoclastically rejects England's Catholic past for the pieties of its protestant present. 11 Spenser's speaker, Verlame, identifies with papal Rome, but Rasmussen writes that the poem itself rejects her "perverse or, at worst, subversive" attachment to popery; instead, the poem presents Philip Sidney as a model of protestant piety and a means for readers to move toward "hope of heaven, and heart to God inclined." 12 This dichotomy between Verlame and Sidney, pagan (or papal) Rome and protestant England, is also reflected in critical responses to why Spenser chooses to set Verulamium "beside the shore / Of silver streaming Thamesis," despite the consensus of Elizabethan antiquarians that the city had been built on the banks of the river Ver.…”

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“With guiltles blood oft stained”: Spenser’sRuines of Timeand the Saints of St. Albans

Mottram

2018

Spenser Studies

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With guiltles blood oft stained": Spenser's Ruines of Time and the Saints of St. Albans Alban is conspicuously absent from Spenser's Ruines of Time. Although Camden writes that Verulamium was "famous for. .. bringing foorth Alban," Spenser's Verlame is silent on Alban and again departs from Camden to claim Verulamium had been built on the Thames. This article argues that the key to Spenser's puzzling approach to Alban and the Thames lies in Verlame's description of the Thames's "pure streames with guiltles blood oft stained." Camden attributes the legend of the errant Thames to "a corrupt place in Gildas," whose account of Alban's martyrdom recounts his miraculous transit through that river. The article explores Spenser's borrowings from Gildas and other medieval lives, arguing that Spenser supplies a shadowy allusion to the "guiltles blood" of Alban and other saints of St. Albans that root his poem within the "protestant" traditions of Britain's pre-Saxon church. Complicating this, however, are Spenser's several departures from Foxe's reformed account of Alban, for Foxe dismisses many of the "Monkish miracles" found in Gildas and the later Lyfe of John Lydgate to which Spenser significantly alludes. Spenser's inclusion of these "Monkish" legends thus works both to affirm and deny his poem's protestant foundations, in the process shedding new light on Spenser's religious sensibilities.

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“With guiltles blood oft stained”: Spenser’sRuines of Timeand the Saints of St. Albans

Mottram

2018

Spenser Studies

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“…Highlighting the continuities forged through the processes of reception and adaptation, scholarship now frequently moves across fields, traversing the old disciplinary boundaries or else dispensing with them altogether (examples include, but are not confined to Lerer; Simpson 2004; Strohm; Summit 2000; Wallace 2004; Williams). This has placed medievalists and Renaissance specialists in dialogue, as scholars examine Renaissance authors’ literary debts to the Middle Ages (Davis 2003; Greenblatt 2001; King 2000; Van Es), as well as the continuities between pre‐ and post‐Reformation forms of thought and religious practice (Cummings; Duffy 1994, 2007; Shell; Walsham). Current interest in the rise of antiquarianism and print culture attest to the value and significance of medieval books in the Renaissance, while increasing attention to the history of the book has changed the dichotomous nature of the medieval/Renaissance divide (Crick and Walsham; Gillespie; Parry; Vine).…”

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Shakespearean Medievalism and the Limits of Periodization inCymbeline

Williams

2011

Literature Compass

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The Renaissance developed the concept of a ‘middle age’ between the classical period and their own culture, while ‘medievalism’ is associated with the aesthetic nostalgia of the Pre‐Raphaelite Brotherhood. Although the idea of Shakespearean medievalism applies a Victorian category anachronistically to Shakespeare, it provides an opportunity to consider the coherence and significance of Shakespeare’s relationship to the Middle Ages, as well as the purpose and agenda behind his adaptations of medieval material. After the periodization debates of the 1990s, which sought to undermine many of the traditional disciplinary distinctions between the Middle Ages and Renaissance, scholars are now turning their attention to how the Renaissance invented the idea of the Middle Ages. This has produced a wide range of new perspectives on Shakespeare’s representation of the Middle Ages that includes the possibility that Shakespeare did not conceptualize history according to fixed periods, such as Medieval and Renaissance. This article argues that Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale is a key source for Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, and that Cymbeline’s use of the Franklin’s Tale provides a key example of Shakespearean medievalism that resists the traditional borders and boundaries of periodization.

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Gloriana, Biblical Typology, and Moral Transfiguration

Stump

2019

Spenser’s Heavenly Elizabeth

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Spenser’s Forms of History

Cited by 28 publications

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“With guiltles blood oft stained”: Spenser’sRuines of Timeand the Saints of St. Albans

“With guiltles blood oft stained”: Spenser’sRuines of Timeand the Saints of St. Albans

Shakespearean Medievalism and the Limits of Periodization inCymbeline

Gloriana, Biblical Typology, and Moral Transfiguration

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