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This is the first book-length study devoted to Una, the beleaguered but ultimately triumphant heroine of Book One of The Faerie Queene. Challenging the standard identification of Spenser’s Una with the post-Reformation Church in England, it argues that she stands, rather, for the community of the redeemed, the invisible Church, whose membership is known by God alone. Una’s story (its Tudor resonances notwithstanding) thus embraces that of the Synagogue before the Incarnation as well as that of the Church in the time of Christ and thereafter. Una’s trajectory also allegorizes the redemptive process that populates the City. Initially fallible, she undergoes a transformation that is explained by the appearance of the kingly lion as Christ in canto iii. Indeed, she becomes Christ-like herself. The tragically alienated figure of Abessa in canto iii represents, it is argued, Synagoga. The disarmingly feckless satyrs in canto vi are the Gentiles of the Apostolic era, and the unreliable yet indispensable dwarf is the embodiment of the adiaphora that define national (i. e., visible), Churches. The import of Spenser’s problematic marriage metaphor is clarified in the light of the Bible and medieval allegories. These individual interpretations contribute to a coherent account of what is shown to be, on Spenser’s part, a consistent treatment of his heroine.
, the truest) institutional embodiment of the distinct community of the redeemed.4 The Elizabethan hierarchy (absorbing precedents set under Henry VIII and Edward VI) categorized ‘ornaments’ and set forms of worship as ‘things indifferent’, or adiaphora (things neither required nor – as the authorities chose to emphasize – forbidden by God). As such, they could be prescribed and imposed nationally. No longer vehicles of superstition, they were to be valued as decorous and ‘edifying’ (a term to which we shall return) rather than for any quasi-magical potency. On his
idea of adiaphora , or things indifferent, one we find glanced at too in the Folio Hamlet’s ‘nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’ ( Hamlet 2.2.231.10–11) or in Troilus’ ‘What’s aught but as ‘tis valued’ ( Troilus and Cressida 2.2.52), both of which date from within a year or two of Metempsychosis . 3 Adiaphora, for the Stoics, were those actions
rather than stubbornness in theological detail. Moreover, one should be attentive to potential errors within oneself and be particularly concerned to identify whether one’s opposition was based on true conviction or on personal dislike. 45 Here Bernard drew on the idea of adiaphora. While many debates over adiaphora centred on obedience to authority where there
held, with Luther against Swiss Christology, that ‘Christ is truly present in His sacrament’, 24 but on other matters, of Catholic ceremony and extreme unction, for example, he was prepared to compromise: these were ‘ adiaphora —things indifferent, unnecessary and generally unwanted by Lutherans, but hardly cardinal sins either’. This moderation characterized Melanchthon’s attitude at the diet of Augsburg (1530) and his acceptance of the distinctly Catholic Leipzig Interim (1548), the latter precipitating what has become known as the ‘adiaphora controversy’. 25
‘puritan’ Malvolio, ‘Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?’ (Twelfth Night, 2.3.103–4), places controversy about these customs under erasure, on this view, as among adiaphora: those matters of indifference on which relaxed or latitudinarian Christians could agree to differ.12 Walsham has lent weight to this congenial account of the early modern English exception by showing how an entire system of method acting for simulating conformity with the Elizabethan state religion was perfected by increasing numbers of ‘church papists
doctrine of salvation as implied throughout (and in canto x in particular) is the doctrine of the English Church – as preached, for instance, in the Homilies. As for the Protestant institutions in general (which do at least include the Church in England), Una’s ‘needments’, carried by the dwarf, are the adiaphora of institutionalized religion – and the dwarf proves, in the end, invaluable to both Una and Red Cross. And, as I have just suggested in Chapter 8, Spenser attaches enormous significance to the two Protestant sacraments, their institutional agency and adiaphoric
This book is the first ever concordance to the rhymes of Spenser’s epic. It gives the reader unparalleled access to the formal nuts and bolts of this massive poem: the rhymes which he used to structure its intricate stanzas.
As well as the main concordance to the rhymes, the volume features a wealth of ancillary materials, which will be of value to both professional Spenserians and students, including distribution lists and an alphabetical listing of all the words in The Faerie Queene. The volume breaks new ground by including two studies by Richard Danson Brown and J. B. Lethbridge, so that the reader is given provocative analyses alongside the raw data about Spenser as a rhymer. Brown considers the reception of rhyme, theoretical models and how Spenser’s rhymes may be reading for meaning. Lethbridge in contrast discusses the formulaic and rhetorical character of the rhymes.
(Chapter 7). In brief: the dwarf ’s eventual support of Una represents the broadly visible ‘services’ through which the visible institutional Church (or churches) may support, and even (allegorically) embody the functions of the invisible Church.48 These adiaphora include the forms and material ‘ornaments’ of worship, which 47 Lancelot Andrewes, Sermons of the Nativity and of Repentance and Fasting: Ninety-Six Sermons, 2 vols (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1861), I, 283 (italics mine). Andrewes’s text was Eph. 1:10, and in the peroration excerpted here he quotes
, Or Easter's eve appear (1–8). 48 Again, the poem is a direct provocation to the pious and godly. The church is seasonally decorated with different plants and flowers, which Puritans found pagan and blasphemous. Furthermore, these are all ‘for show’, at best ‘things indifferent’ (adiaphora), acceptable to Christians who accepted that ritual was a part of church worship; at worst, idolatrous. The debate over what could