Spenser and the Renaissance Ideal of Christian Heroism

Abstract

WITH THE REEMERGENCE of the classics in the Italian Renaissance, particularly Homer, the concept of a Christian hero as distinct from the Christian champion arose to shape an enormous body of European literature. Broadly speaking, we may describe Christian heroism as aspiring to create an ideal figure, reminiscent of both the chivalric knight and the Christian Everyman, who might fit into a heroic poem that should at the same time rival and eclipse the epics of classical antiquity.1 Perhaps the first poem approaching such dimensions was Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, a superlative romance, but with more tenuous claims to either Christian or heroic values. Ovid, not Virgil, remains clearly the main inspiration for Ariosto's playfully pagan sensuosity, and only by strenuous allegorical interpretation can Christianity be construed as a major force in the poem. Significantly, however, such interpretation was by no means lacking in sixteenth-century Italy, where a host of commentators eagerly supplied it. Concurrently in Portugal Camoens could describe Vasco da Gama's daring voyage with a truly missionary zeal and so create a narrative where heroic action genuinely dramatizes the virtues of the Christian faith. But except for one peculiar episode the Lusiadas lacks the dimension of romance. The curious allegory of the Island of Love with which the epic concludes is apparently evidence of Camoens' felt need to define however hastily his military hero's relation to a world of pastoral romance, where hero and lover are inseparable.