Spenser

This course centers on the writing of Edmund Spenser (1552–1599), early modern England’s self-styled national poet. We will devote much of our attention to The Faerie Queene, a complex intertwining of romance and epic that is Spenser’s major poetic achievement and the most important understudied work of the English Renaissance. Spenser himself referred to The Faerie Queene as an “endlesse worke” because he couldn’t finish it, but it’s also endless in the sense that it richly rewards deep study. The Faerie Queene envisions a world saturated with meaning, and the poem’s allegory is everywhere engaged with the challenges, dangers, and delights of interpreting it. We will enrich our simultaneous study of Spenser’s poetry and the culture of English early modernity by reading some of his shorter poems, including The Shepheardes Calender, his poetic debut, and the Amoretti, his sonnet sequence. 

We will supplement this work with a visit to Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which will highlight the literary, political, and cultural traditions on which Spenser’s work draws. We’ll also attend the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition on Tudor England, which will offer a glimpse of the royal iconography that Spenser’s writing both endorses and critiques.  

Finally, we will confront Spenser’s colonialist views as expressed in his View of the State of Ireland, a prose tract he wrote after serving as secretary to Arthur Grey, the architect of England’s brutal attempt to colonize Ireland in the 1580s. Taking Spenser’s poetic and political careers together, this course will uncover the deeply contradictory aims of writing in the early modern humanist tradition, which questioned traditional class hierarchies and imagined new ways of fashioning the self at the same time that it helped to sanction England’s burgeoning imperial ambitions.