Spenser's Poetry and the Reformation Tradition

In this extended treatment of Edmund Spenser's place in the Reformation literary tradition, John King presents the poet as a rival of classical and Italianate literary predecessors by placing his work within a distinctively English context. Rather than follow those contemporaries who rejected the unpretentious devices of mid-Tudor satire and allegory, Spenser, it is shown, infuses them with sophisticated standards of the Continental Renaissance.

King's study begins with the consideration of Spenser's debut as an innovator who, paradoxically, emulates "Chaucerian" precedent for pastoral satire. By revising critical opinions that identify an iconoclastic movement in The Faerie Queene, he demonstrates the constructive aspect of the Reformation attack against idolatry that underlies the pervasive inversion and mutation of iconic tableaux in the poem. This study culminates in a detailed reading of Book I of The Faerie Queene that addresses Spenser's reformation, within the all-inclusive frame of allegorical romantic epic, of deficient and worldly forms of romance, pastoral, and tragedy into a set of purged and elevated Christian counterparts.