Polemic and Nostalgia: Medieval Crosscurrents in Spenser’s Allegory of Pride

Abstract

This essay recasts the perennial question of Spenser’s Protestantism as a question of literary influence: how does The Faerie Queene’s nostalgia for medieval representational systems qualify its effectiveness as Reformation polemic? Book I’s sequential anatomies of pride in Redcrosse’s encounters first with Lucifera and then with Orgoglio suggest the inadequacy of pre-Reformation confidence in human striving. Redcrosse more or less escapes the threat posed by the Seven Deadly Sins—a topos that would have already looked antiquated to Spenser’s late sixteenth-century readers—but falls captive to a more comprehensive, ultimately more Protestant, figuration of pride as a misguided trust in the natural man. Yet this is only the first half of a complex intertextual story. As the second section of the essay suggests, the diptychal analysis of pride is itself sufficiently indebted to pre-Reformation commentaries to qualify Book I’s denigration of the medieval past as a period of unmitigated error.