Edmund Spenser and Continental Humanism: The St. George Legend in The Faerie Queene, Book I, and Mantuan’s Georgius

Abstract

This article contends that in his treatment of the St. George legend Edmund Spenser utilized a heightened sense of historical perspective that developed in Italy among Quattrocento humanists like Mantuan (Baptista Mantuanus). A commonly held assumption that humanist poets could not have taken the legend seriously has obscured the fact that Mantuan and Alexander Barclay composed poems using the material and that Spenser, who modeled his Shepheardes Calender partly on Mantuan’s eclogues, would almost certainly have known the Georgius, Mantuan’s hagiographic epic on St. George. In comparison to Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea, Spenser’s most commonly accepted source, the Quattrocento Italian poet forged a new, humanist relationship between truth and fiction in his Georgius, transposing Alcyone’s lament and the fen with its dragon into a poetic mode of discourse which, following the implications of Anne Moss’s Latin language turn, resists categorization as being either “true” or “false.” In representing his Christian saint as converting the pagan citizenry and reorienting the Graeco-Roman gods within a changed, New Testament world, Mantuan gave Spenser a model when he envisioned the Red Cross’s struggle with the dragon as the concluding, climactic event within Judeo-Christian history. The Georgius would thus seem to supply the missing term between de Voragine’s version and Spenser’s visionary reimagining of the story, encouraging the English poet to go beyond the contempt of sixteenth-century Reformers for saints’ lives and use the material to shape “an empire nowhere,” a transcendent spiritual and material potentiality rooted, like Mantuan’s hagiographic epic, within a humanist treatment of Judeo-Christian time.