<em>Virtus</em> without <em>Telos</em>, or the Ethics of Vulnerability in Early Modern England

Abstract

VIRTUS WITHOUT TELOS, OR THE ETHICS OF VULNERABILITY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND VIRTUS WITHOUT TELOS, OR THE ETHICS OF VULNERABILITY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and Ethics of Masculinity by Joseph Campana. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Pp. 296. $55.00 cloth.The Pain of Reformation posits masculinity as an ethical condition, not just a social role, in Edmund Spenser's 1590 Faene Queene. This shift in inquiry highlights heroic masculinity's propensity for and domination, and suggests tensions inherent a poem that purports to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle as Letter of Authors famously avers. Rather than a didactic project that depends on creating an invulnerable masculine subject from imposition of codified discipline, 1590 Faerie Queene emerges as poem concerned with vulnerability, including a fundamental openness bodily experience. In Joseph Campana's deft analysis, vulnerability becomes the source of a new understanding of masculinity and ethics, which might be united in term (8). This book does not just attend vulnerability as underside of in Spenser's expansive narrative. Instead, Campana argues that the 1590 Faerie Queene is in fact an allegory of vulnerability, one that disarms and reforms masculinity as a project of (204). Violence becomes subject critique, and programmatic habitus of traditional virtue is superseded by a reformed model of masculinity attuned pain and suffering as well as pleasure and joy.Sensation, not governance, organizes this new masculinity. While Campana acknowledges that a powerful Protestant ethos runs through Spenser's poem, he connects this militant form of selfmastery trauma of suffered in wake of England's break with Rome. The of Reformation suggests that an impervious moral identity is only a meager defense against, and therefore an insufficient solution to, experience of pain wrought by decades of religious upheaval. Spenser instead elaborates what Campana calls a sympathetic sociality (168 passim), which might mend harms of a community rent by generations of suffering. An ethics founded on an acknowledgment of shared vulnerability reforms heroic masculine subject and provides new grounds for ethical action that acknowledges bodily experiences of all those involved.As exemplars of this reformation, knights of 1590 Faerie Queene are caught in a bind between inviolable heroism and vulnerable compassion. Campana identifies this aporia as characteristic of sixteenth-century poetry, so that Spenser's effort create an aesthetics that expresses flesh's sensitivities as a new foundation for ethical action is rendered through struggles of Knights of Holiness, Temperance, and Chastity. To reformulate masculinity as an ethical condition-one that re-members classical virtus-is create a new model of virtue responsive Reformation's manifold harms. Rather than predicating ethical life on prescriptive norms or moralistic rules, virtue, as Campana analyzes it across Spenser's 1590 narrative, emerges from shared relations of affect, energy, and sensation. Rethinking Spenser's ethical project makes a profound difference ways we might read Legends of Holiness, Temperance, and Chastity.In charting Redcrosse Knight's difficulties in book 1, Campana acknowledges appeal of a dematerializing moral regime that asserts control over pain, violence, and suffering. Yet, even if we recognize defensive reassurance that fantasy of rational control over insensate matter might hold, a series of unsettling encounters in Legend of Holiness works undermine this model of masculine virtue. Chapter 1, Reading Bleeding Trees: The Poetics of Other People's Pain, focuses on Redcrosse Knight's inability respond suffering of others, and questions how we witness and respond violence even when that is supposedly sanctioned as part of purifying process of ethical reform (73). …