Isabel MacCaffrey contends that, in allegory, the mind makes a model of itself, and she shows that The Faerie Queene, mirroring as it does the mind's structure, is both a treatise on and an example of the central role that imagination plays in human life. Viewing the poem as a model of Spenser's universe, the author investigates the poet's theory of knowledge and the role of imagination in the construction of cosmic models. She begins with a survey of theories of the imagination and the creation of fictions, establishing a context in which allegorical images may be understood throughout the European allegorical tradition to which The Faerie Queene belongs. Isabel MacCaffrey's new readings show that insofar as Spenser's poem concerns modes of knowledge, it offers the reader an anatomy of its own composition, an analysis of imagination in its varied relations to the world. Originally published in 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Spenser's Allegory of Love approaches the major characters in Books III, IV, and V of The Faerie Queene as fictional personages who function psychically according to Renaissance sexual psychology and physically according to Renaissance sexual physiology. This approach enables readings of the quests in their own peculiar, allegorical way as imitations of actions. For each of the questers - Britomart, Florimell, Scudamour, and Timias - union with a loved one is the goal; and that goal is achieved, however problematically, in each of the quests. When the interwoven quests, which begin in Book III, continue through Book IV, and, with Britomart's quest, into Book V, are separated out and explicated, these three books of Spenser's Faerie Queene can be read so as to constitute a social vision.

The only form of monumental artistic expression practiced from antiquity to the Enlightenment, allegory evolved to its fullest complexity in Dante's Commedia and Spenser's Faerie Queene. Drawing on a wide range of literary, visual, and critical works in the European tradition, Gordon Teskey provides both a literary history of allegory and a theoretical account of the genre which confronts fundamental questions about the violence inherent in cultural forms. Approaching allegory as the site of intense ideological struggle, Teskey argues that the desire to raise temporal experience to ever higher levels of abstraction cannot be realized fully but rather creates a "rift" that allegory attempts to conceal. After examining the emergence of allegorical violence from the gendered metaphors of classical idealism, Teskey describes its amplification when an essentially theological form of expression was politicized in the Renaissance by the introduction of the classical gods, a process leading to the replacement of allegory by political satire and cartoons. He explores the relationship between rhetorical voice and forms of indirect speech (such as irony) and investigates the corporeal emblematics of violence in authors as different as Machiavelli and Yeats. He considers the large organizing theories of culture, particularly those of Eliot and Frye, which take the place in the modern world of earlier allegorical visions. Concluding with a discussion of the Mutabilitie Cantos, Teskey describes Spenser's metaphysical allegory, which is deconstructed by its own invocation of genealogical struggle, as a prophetic vision and a form of warning.

Edmund Spenser famously conceded to his friend Walter Raleigh that his method in The Faerie Queene 'will seeme displeasaunt' to those who would 'rather have good discipline delivered plainly in way of precepts, or sermoned at large.' Spenser's allegory and Elizabethan biblical exegesis is the first book-length study to clarify Spenser's comparison by introducing readers to the biblical typologies of contemporary sermons and liturgies. The result demonstrates that 'precepts ... sermoned at large' from lecterns and pulpits were themselves often 'clowdily enwrapped in allegoricall devises'. In effect, routine churchgoing prepared Spenser's first readers to enjoy and interpret The Faerie Queene. A wealth of relevant quotations invites readers to adopt an Elizabethan mindset and encounter the poem afresh. The 'chronicle history' cantos, Florimell's adventures, the Souldan episode, Mercilla's judgment on Duessa and even the two stanzas that close the Mutabilitie fragment, all come into sharper focus when juxtaposed with contemporary religious rhetoric.

'This masterly work ought to be The Elizabethan Encyclopedia, and no less.' - Cahiers Elizabethains Edmund Spenser remains one of Britain's most famous poets. With nearly 700 entries this Encyclopedia provides a comprehensive one-stop reference tool for: * appreciating Spenser's poetry in the context of his age and our own * understanding the language, themes and characters of the poems * easy to find entries arranged by subject.

An examination of the way in which the material world is depicted in The Faerie Queene. This book provides a radical reassessment of Spenserian allegory, in particular of The Faerie Queene, in the light of contemporary historical and theoretical interests in space and material culture. It explores the ambiguous and fluctuating attention to materiality, objects, and substance in the poetics of The Faerie Queene, and discusses the way that Spenser's creation of allegorical meaning makes use of this materiality, and transforms it.It suggests further that a critical engagement with materiality (which has been so important to the recent study of early modern drama) must come, in the case of allegorical narrative, through a study of narrative and physical space, and in this context it goes on to provide a reading of the spatial dimensions of the poem - quests and battles, forests, castles and hovels - and the spatial characteristics of Spenser's other writings. The book reaffirms theneed to place Spenser in his historical contexts - philosophical and scientific, military and architectural - in early modern England, Ireland and Europe, but also provides a critical reassessment of this literary historicism. Dr CHRISTOPHER BURLINSON is a Research Fellow in English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.