Search results
Ralph Knevet's Supplement of the Faery Queene (1635) is a narrative and allegorical work, which weaves together a complex collection of tales and episodes, featuring knights, ladies, sorcerers, monsters, vertiginous fortresses and deadly battles – a chivalric romp in Spenser's cod medieval style. The poem shadows recent English history, and the major military and political events of the Thirty Years War. But the Supplement is also an ambitiously intertextual poem, weaving together materials from mythic, literary, historical, scientific, theological, and many other kinds of written sources. Its encyclopaedic ambitions combine with Knevet's historical focus to produce an allegorical epic poem of considerable interest and power.
This new edition of Knevet's Supplement, the first scholarly text of the poem ever published, situates it in its literary, historical, biographical, and intellectual contexts. An extensive introduction and copious critical commentary, positioned at the back of the book, will enable students and scholars alike to access Knevet's complicated and enigmatic meanings, structures, and allusions.
This chapter contains extensive critical commentary of A Supplement of the Faery Queene, exploring Knevet's complicated and enigmatic meanings, structures and allusions.
the office of deputy to the chief remembrancer of the exchequer in the late 1580s and early 1590s, during which time he had acquired a reputation as a serial complainer, regularly dispatching exhaustive memoranda detailing the inadequacies of government institutions in Ireland and the corrupt activities of senior officials there.2 His targets ranged from practices such as the abuse of martial law and malfeasance amongst the exchequer officers to individuals as highly placed in the Irish administration as Adam Loftus, the archbishop of Dublin, lord chancellor of
someone who had worked as a bishop’s secretary, with a knowledge of canon law.19 The chancellor ‘had the custody of the Great Seal; all royal charters, letters patent and close and other public instruments issued out of the Chancery, and were enrolled there; his writs set in motion the courts of justice, and authorised the issue of money from the King’s Exchequer. Thus he was at first an executive rather than a judicial officer.’20 The clerk’s duties would have involved overseeing a number of ecclesiastical issues, establishing who had the right to which benefice and
Anglo-Irish nobles, bureaucrats, churchmen and merchants. Prominent among these manuscripts are Bodleian Douce MS 104, a copy of the C-text of Piers Plowman that was produced by scribes employed at the Irish Exchequer, and Longleat MS 29, a manuscript containing works of Christian spiritual instruction produced by legal clerk Nicholas Bellewe, probably for Ismaia Perers, wife of prominent landowner William FitzWilliam.3 Many of the literary works circulating in the Dublin area focused on spiritual or moral edification. They include copies of the works of Richard
act passe towchinge my Lady Cauendisshe itt shall be agay[n]st my will’.34 Despite this, she was pursued for the money by the exchequer until her third husband Sir William St Loe compounded with the Bess of Hardwick, a life 23 crown in August 1563 for £1,000 and had a release and pardon for the remainder. He seems to have paid for both the composition and for the release and pardon out of his own pocket.35 On 27 August 1559 Bess married Sir William St Loe (d. 1565), heir to Sir John St Loe (1500/1–59) of Sutton Court in Somerset and his wife, Margaret (d
. Others predicted that no child of Henry VIII’s would ever have a monument. However, Robert Cecil, well aware of the political power of the Monumental Body, vowed: “Rather than fail in payment for Queen Elizabeth’s tomb, neither the Exchequer nor London shall have a penny left”’. See Nigel Llewellyn, ‘The Royal Body: Monuments to the Dead, For the Living’, in Renaissance Bodies, ed. Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (London: Reaktion Books, 1995), 225. MUP_Armitage_Ralegh.indd 330 07/10/2013 14:09 Ralegh’s image in art 331 imprisoned in 1592 for his part in an
, this creditor–debtor relationship ought to be placed in the larger context in which each stands in the debt of God. Hence a different letter promises to remember all of Lady Huntington’s favours, ‘nor leave them unrequited in my Exchequer, which is, the blessings of God upon my prayers’ (Letters 237). Elsewhere, the winter urges his addressee to ‘beleeve me that I shall ever with much affection, and much devotion joine both your fortune and your last best happinesse, with the desire of mine own in all my civill, and divine wishes, as the only retribution in the power