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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.
8 The multiplication of Una Una’s transformation into the City of God (the invisible Church, the community of the redeemed, the body of Christ), although hidden from the reader, would appear to have taken place at the very instant of her desertion by Red Cross and the dwarf.1 From this point on, until the rapprochement initiated by the dwarf in canto vii, Una is isolated – either literally (as when she is ‘far from all peoples preace, as in exile’, I.iii.3.3) or metaphorically (as when she is persecuted, abducted, or maliciously deceived). Thrown into relief by
first appearance (at the beginning of canto i), Una’s dwarf emblematically ‘shoulders’ the adiaphoric regulations pertaining to the Church – the visible Church that must, if it is to qualify as ‘true’, embody and accommodate the invisible Church represented by Una. His departure from Una in canto ii implies that he has become superstitiously attached to the full panoply of Catholic ceremonial. Spenser thus acknowledges puritanical objections to the effect that any ceremonial could function as the thin end of the wedge of idolatry – an objection that had been
corresponds with Augustine’s ‘City of God’, the Church whose truth derives solely from the regenerate status of its members. This City, or Church, may be described as ‘ invisible’ – both because its membership is dispersed, and also because that same dispersed membership is known only to God. Its ‘oneness’ might therefore be described as purely conceptual. As the invisible Church, Una exists in an intermediate realm between the divine and the human. While the function of the community for which Una stands is to represent Christ, it would be inaccurate to describe the
Church influences his definition of the invisible Church to the point that it is difficult to distinguish it from an earthly institution (however unofficial and ignored it might have been). And it may be symptomatic of this that he conceives of it as a community whose members (as opposed to God alone) recognize each other: ‘For like as is the nature of truth, so is the proper condition of the true church, that commonly none seeth it, but such only as be the members and partakers thereof ’ (I, xix). We see Augustine’s invisible City metamorphosing into what Foxe calls
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 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.
:5 the lion that becomes Una’s ‘suffering servant’ (and eventually dies in her defence) represents Christ. Even before he is (as it were) joined with Una, he sees her as angelic, even divine. This is because, as Beza explains in his commentary on the Song of Songs, Christ views his elect not as they are, but as they will be in the fullness of time.1 Partnered by the lion, Una represents (as argued in Chapter 3) Augustine’s City of God, the invisible Church. As such, she is Christ-like, and (as I claim in Chapter 7) a mirror of the Trinity. While Spenser no doubt
-page of almost every mid-Tudor printed confession: ‘For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; And with the mouth, man confesseth to salvation’ (Rom. 10:10).23 For Bishop Hooper, writing at the dawn of the Marian exile, such verses signified the almost inextricable links between Christian confession and the apocalyptic manifestation of the ‘true’, invisible Church.24 Yet the equation between heart and mouth also underscores for Foucault a further principle of confession: that it elaborates a primarily mimetic relationship between creed, or avowal, and the
position to consider Una’s election – or, more practically, given that election itself is beyond human comprehension and exists outside time – her call to election – that call by which the elect (the community epitomized and represented by Una) are initiated into the redemptive process by which they are incorporated into (and thus become) the invisible Church. (As we shall see, this latter process, like the invisible Church itself, is destined to remain incomplete until the end of time.) Paul, alluding to the story of how God reassured Elijah (in despair over the