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Jean Kane, professor of English at Vassar College, examines the influence of C. Clifford Flanigan, late Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University and Kane’s former mentor. Reflecting on his unexpected death in 1993, which brought into question her own pedagogy in the face of grief, Kane offers a personal insight into her classroom as she attempts to bridge the gap between instructor and student when dealing with loss.

Early seventeenth-century English verse and thirteenth-century Anatolian Sufi poetry, though from different cultures and eras, converge in their exploration of going beyond material existence through love. In the verses of Edmund Spenser, John Donne, George Herbert, Mawlana Jalaluddin Rumi, Yunus Emre and Haji Bektash Veli, love emerges as a medium for spiritual awakening that liberates individuals from mundane life and socio-political conflicts and leads to an elevated consciousness merged with the divine. Thus, this article will analyse Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," Rumi's "You and I," Spenser's "An Hymne in Honour of Heavenly Love," Emre's "Lovers Die Not," Herbert's "Love III," and Veli's "The Transcendence of Saints" in light of Plato's idea of Oneness and the Sufi doctrine of wahdat-i wujud and suggest that these poems reveal love as a transformative power enabling individuals to transcend their worldly existence and become One with the beloved, namely the divine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What has reading to do with love? The early modern sonnet sequence would answer that the one has everything to do with the other – or, more precisely, that reading and writing are necessary means by which one might attain love, or if not attain it outright, might at least hope to mirror, capture, or move a little closer to it. Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti plays upon the intertwined sensory and sensual pleasures of reading from their inception, emphasizing that reading, writing, and love are fundamentally embodied practices. This essay engages this sonnet sequence, arguing that Spenser recognizes and plays with the simultaneous independence and interdependency of soul, spirit, and heart with the body. Through an embodied reading practice – focused on the ways by which the lovers of the Amoretti are described as reading and being read through the sensorium – this essay argues that the mutual acts of “correct” reading displayed by the lovers of the sonnets are key to self-fashioning.

Throughout his Faerie Queene , Edmund Spenser depicts himself as a "poet magus" who can peer behind the veil of Nature in order to discover a "secret teaching" of ethical and political virtue that he will impart to his readers. His readers are thus tasked with the chore of reforming the fallen world through the creation of an empire under Elizabeth. However, in "The Two Cantos of Mutabilitie," Spenser seems to relinquish this vision. Indeed, Mutabilitie, on one level serves as a mirroring figure of Spenser's own ambitions. Mutabilitie's claims for the fragility and mutability of (temporal) existence are prefigured throughout The Faerie Queene , but in "The Two Cantos," they take center stage. Spenser's depiction of Nature's triumph over Mutabilitie provides a lesson for Spenser himself, and he appears to reject his bombastic claims of knowledge as well as his projected imperial vision for a position of humble supplication before God, whose Providence is the ultimately the most powerful force in The Faerie Queene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short piece recounts the experience of listening to recordings of Sean Bonney’s work in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the years preceding and following the white supremacist rally held there in 2017. It argues that Bonney’s poetry provides a poetics of despair that resists complacency and paradoxically offers comfort.

Scholars have long appreciated the centrality of envy to Satan's characterization in Paradise Lost , and they have sometimes extended the importance of envy to Beelzebub, his closest associate. This note, however, argues that scholars have failed to appreciate the full significance of Beelzebub's connection with envy in the poem because they have not yet acknowledged the rich cultural association between Beelzebub and envy that existed in early modern literary culture. After surveying Beelzebub's connection to envy in the poem, Bradley J. Irish unpacks the linkage between Beelzebub and envy in early modern culture—a thematic resonance that is unfamiliar to us but that would have been immediately apparent for many of Milton's original readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines two Latin translations of The Shepheardes Calender by John Dove (1584) and Theodore Bathurst (c.1602) respectively. It explores their versions of three aspects of Spenserian pastoral (all prominent in E.K.'s gloss): community and competition; allegory and allusion; register and rusticity. Throughout, it argues for the influence of translation theory on the translations and The Shepheardes Calender. It revises misinformation about the translations, demonstrating that Dove's translation influenced Bathurst's and that Bathurst's is collectively authored. It explores the way in which the translations 're-allegorize' the Calender and reproduce Spenser's rustic style. While Bathurst's translation reveals an interest in Spenser's experience of patronage and poetic career, Dove attends to the poem's religious allegory, political significance, and linguistic agenda, ultimately using his translation to allude to the public disputations of Edmund Campion. Rather than 'missing the point' of Spenser's vernacular achievement, the translations extend the remit of Spenserian pastoral. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces Aristotelian ideas about natural slavery through Book VI of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. By putting the Salvage Man episode in conversation with Louis Le Roy's commentary on the Politics, I demonstrate that the poem naturalizes the enslavement of extra-European peoples. This reading reconsiders analysis of the Salvage Man as a figure of savage assimilation. Rather than become civil himself, the Salvage Man is shown to be congenitally predisposed to serving others who are physiologically more vulnerable and in need of his labor. I argue that Spenser's depictions of these physically weak characters racialize the need to be served by others. Vulnerability is here a racial category used to naturalize the enslavement of bodies imagined to be stronger, harder, and less than human in their resilience. The article ends by rereading the Salvage Nation episode in light of the Salvage Man's representation of natural slavery, showing that these two encounters align human vulnerability and racial whiteness. Taken together, these episodes suggest that to be human is to be feeble, White, and in need of enslaved bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The potential of interracial, interreligious, and intercultural mixing—that is, cultural hybridity—was a frequent source of anxiety in the literature of sixteenth-century England. Following the start of the Tudor conquest of Ireland, contemporary writers and makers of Anglo-Irish policy emphasized that Irish culture, especially its language, laws, and customs, was seen as debilitating to English hegemony and demanded eradication. This article examines Tudor attitudes toward colonialization and cultural hybridity in two texts, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), each of which focus on the position of one product of cultural intermarriage, the hybrid child. Through an interrogation of both More’s portrayal of an idealized aftermath of colonial enterprise and Spenser’s genocidal fantasy of English imperialism in Ireland, I argue that cultural hybridity is simultaneously rendered integral and dangerous to the former and inherently destructive to the latter due to the ontological liminality of the hybrid child. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In several Disraeli novels, the best of traditional English morals and, indeed, of a bygone England itself are associated with the spirituality (although not the ecclesiology) of Catholicism. Disraeli suggests that, within Catholic communities of the present day, are nurtured ways of viewing the world, ways of being in the world, at once quintessentially and valuably English. He does not of course advocate the return of his country to its Old Religion but, rather, implies that the merits of Catholicism should be acknowledged, that political disempowerment of Catholics should be ended, and that the Old Religion should be allowed peacefully to co-exist with the Established Church. Central to his staging of that argument is the donna angelica topos. Disraeli fashions a number of his major, female characterizations--who are devoutly Catholic--in accord with its conventions, which had been most influentially iterated in Dante's portrayal of Beatrice and Petrarch's of Laura. Their likenesses had been often and notably recreated in English texts: by Edmund Spenser (to name but one notable example), and also thereafter by quite different poets, such as Alexander Pope. Writing consciously and innovatively within that various tradition, Disraeli uses the donna angelica topos for contemporaneously political ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cahiers Elisabethains: A Biannual Journal of English Renaissance Studies is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Cahiers Elisabethains: A Biannual Journal of English Renaissance Studies is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Foreign Literature Studies is the property of Foreign Literature Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article focuses on the semantics of space within Spenser’s chivalric allegory The Faerie Queene (1590/1596). Special attention is paid to the spatial model of allegorical castle from the second book of the poem. Spenser’s artistic manner is considered; in particular, his partaking of the mannerist style. There is offered an analysis of one of the most puzzling passages of the poem, the House of Temperance. The castle’s keep (the residence of the fair soul called Alma) is shaped as a healthy human body, housing several allegorical rooms. The keep of this allegorical castle was extensively discussed in criticism, as it seems, to the detriment of its fortifications and surroundings, without which the whole allegorical picture remains rather incomplete. This article considers the castle of Temperance in its wholeness, including the allegorical topography of its landscape. The keep/body is surrounded by a system of bulwarks, forming a structure similar to a pentangle: each bastion stands for one of the five senses. On the one side of the castle, there are wild woods where monsters (sins and seductions) live; on the other side, there is a lake holding the waters of baptism. The eclectic castle of Temperance is studied against the cultural and scholarly background of Spenser’s epoch. This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the 27 th Shakespeare Readings (Moscow, 2018).

This paper considers how Spenser's conception of conscience and universal law and justice in A View of the Present State of Ireland can be understood within the context of jurist Christopher St. German's early sixteenth-century tract on equity and the common law and his subsequent tracts on the reformation of Church corruption. The paper attempts to re-situate Spenser's engagement with legal and political theory within the context of English legal education as it had developed throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Ultimately, it shows that Spenser's engagement with law, theology and politics reflected a commitment to a new Protestant conception of transnational Christendom as well as a re-conception of England as a Protestant nation within that transnational entity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the View as an example of knowledge production, rather than plumbing it for representation or ideology as scholars have traditionally done. Tracing the process of construction, sources, and generic conventions that Spenser wielded not only illuminates some of the more curious elements of the View , but also reveals his practices and motivations for it. As this article suggests, such an approach reinforces the idea that Spenser designed the View as an appeal for the patronage and support of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, by modeling specific forms of expertise and counsel characteristic of the Essex circle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Principia, es un libro de poemas de la poeta mexicana Elisa Díaz Castelo (Ciudad de México, 1986) publicado en 2018 por el Fondo Editorial Tierra Adentro. El texto mezcla el lenguaje poético con el científico, dando como resultado un interesante experimento lingüístico y metafórico.

This paper charts the development over the course of the works of Edmund Spenser about ideas about patronage, specifically the patron's obligations to the poet. This survey shows that Spenser's earlier works (published before the mid-1590s) value material gain as the primary reward of patronage, while the later works prioritize protection from enemies over material reward. This aligns well with the changes in Spenser's circumstances. The works appearing in the mid-1590s onward were written at a time when Spenser expressed concerns about Lord Burghley's hostility towards him and the peril that the Irish posed to his accumulated land and wealth in Ireland. Accordingly, the later works focus on the need for patron to protect the poet from hostile aristocrats and warlike savages. This survey upends widespread critical assumptions that material gain was the only patronal reward valued by early modern English poets. It also establishes protection, usually assumed to be a meaninglessly conventional request from poets, to be a substantial goal sought from patrons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Edmund Spenser is an obvious inclusion in the development of British colonial ideology toward Ireland, William Shakespeare is not. Even though scholars have commented in detail on Shakespeare's depiction of colonialism in The Tempest and his inclusion of Celtic elements in several of his plays, the idea that Shakespeare specifically engaged English imperial policy toward Ireland, especially in his lesser critiqued play Troilus and Cressida, is underexplored. In this article, I wish to contribute to the conversation by focusing on texts not usually read through the lens of postcolonial Irish studies or comparatively understood as addressing Irish topics. I offer a reading of Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare and examine their engagement in literary representations of England's imperial activities in Ireland, specifically the Nine Years War between England and Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sederi is the property of Spanish & Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies (SEDERI) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)