The Well of Life: All Things Made New

Abstract

This chapter suggests that Edmund Spenser's well can be located within what Alexandra Walsham, in her discussion of ‘the post-Reformation history of holy wells’, has cited as Book 1 of Spenser's The Faerie Queene. This part of the book is set in a landscape that, like early modern London, is palimpsestic, a landscape in which fountains and other water sources might be seen as wormholes, interpenetrating the layers both of the narrative and the environment in which it unfolds, and compelling the careful attention of the reader. Spenser's Well of Life is a holy well and a healing spring but, like the well on the Tudor hat badge, it is also the Living Water and the Word of God; it combines in its action the ampullae's pre-Reformation thaumaturgy of sacred water, reinflected not only sacramentally but textually, the providentialist Protestant medical culture increasingly growing up around wells and baths in the second half of the 16th century.