Spenser and the Historical Revolution: Briton Moniments and the Problem of Roman Britain

Curran argues that, since Roman Britain is a key to understanding the historiographical debates of Edmund Spenser\u27s time, the Roman Britain section of Briton Moniments in The Faerie Queene needs to be examined. It is here that Spenser acknowledged the direction historiography was taking, and saw how this new trend altered the relation between history and glory

\u3cem\u3eJacob and Esau and the Iconoclasm of Merit

This article contends that the mid-Tudor interlude Jacob and Esau, long known to have a Protestant slant, promotes a Calvinistic doctrine of election consonant with Edwardian theology and that in doing so it also enacts a rare kind of iconoclastic drama. The play invalidates the very discriminations between the brothers it seems to encourage us to make. This building up only to break down the differences between the elect and the reprobate proves God’s judgments to be unresponsive to human merits and utterly inscrutable, even as it prompts the audience to beware of the limits of perception and the dangers of appearances

Spenser and Logic: Gigantomachia and Contentlessness in The Faerie Queene

Figuring the enforcement of authority against rebellion, the war between the Olympians and the earth-spawned Giants is typically read as a marker of ideology. In The Faerie Queene, Spenser’s abundant allusions to the Gigantomachia can seem straightforwardly ideological, aligning Olympian rule with his virtue-knights, avatars of Elizabethan hegemony, and his giants with subversion. This essay explores another significance for the Gigantomachia, reviewing a different tradition of meaning for the myth-pattern and locating it in the poem—a tradition wherein, rather than liberation in the political realm, the Giants portend the radical oversimplification and even the nullification of thought within the mind. Through conflict with giants, Spenser argues the importance of logic: investigating, idea inventing, discriminating, dialoguing. Giants help clarify the picture of the place of logic, particularly in a Ramist vein, in The Faerie Queene. The foci are the Egalitarian Giant and the correspondences between Orgoglio and Disdaine

The History Never Written: Bards, Druids, and the Problem of Antiquarianism in \u3cem\u3ePoly Olbion\u3c/em\u3e

The rise of antiquarianism in late Elizabethan/early Jacobean England posed a threat to the common and traditional notion of continuity through time of British institutions and culture, including the transmission of historical texts. This threat was a major preoccupation for the poet Michael Drayton, and his response to it can be examined in his depictions of bards and druids in Poly Olbion. Conservatives in the historiographical debate put forth these ancient British poet/priests as an explanation for how ancient British history could have been transmitted through the centuries. But while Drayton in the Poly Olbion certainly uses bards and druids in a concerted attempt to imagine continuity, he reveals some latent suspicions of the truth - that ancient British culture was irretrievably lost