Abstract This article examines the institution of the Bedchamber of James I of England (1603–1625) through the practice of feasting. Originally comprising James VI’s Scottish entourage, the Bedchamber was a novel introduction to the English royal household in the Jacobean period: as such, this group of attendants came to represent both a body with unparalleled royal access, and a Scottish barrier between James I and his English court. By approaching the Bedchamber through its social and cultural obligations, the institution emerges as a mediating, rather than restrictive, body, serving to enact reconciliation between the king, the Court, and foreign states. Moreover, the Bedchamber’s feasting calendar indicates a broad basis of reward, circulating around several Bedchamber Gentlemen rather than a single favorite. Patterns of Bedchamber feasting ultimately reflected a Court that was largely accessible, not significantly structured by ethnic divisions, and conducive to the proliferation of culture and favor.

Abstract Early modern Ireland was notoriously, or reputedly, a place of disease: the plague, the ague, the country fever, the looseness, the bloody flux, and an assortment of coughs, chills, sweats, and other illnesses—Ireland’s endemii morbi or “reigning diseases”—regularly figure in surviving letters and historical accounts from the period. This essay explores not only the reports of disease issuing from Ireland at this time, but the way in which the experience and rhetoric of contagion help to shape ideas about space, security, and civility in the colonial theory of the period. In Spenser’s View of the present state of Ireland (c. 1596) and Bryskett’s A Discourse of Ciuill Life (1606), illness and its metaphors seem to correlate with, and perhaps to occasion, complex responses to the alleged disorder and promiscuity of the Irish—energies evident, too, in the military and political strategies of deputies Sir Henry Sidney, Arthur Lord Grey, and Sir Arthur Chichester. This essay sees Spenser’s View and Bryskett’s Discourse as polemical attempts – at key moments before the planting of Munster and Ulster – to push New English colonial policy away from the morbid failures of Pale government and violent military suppression toward the corpus sanum of plantation.

Abstract This paper begins with an account of the history of modern editions of Spenser’s View, analyzes textual scholarship, and concludes with a skeptical reexamination of Spenser’s rhetorical objectives. As this paper will demonstrate, a critical bibliography is needed to clarify the dates, scribes, and provenance of the twenty-one complete manuscripts of the View of the Present State of Ireland.

Abstract This study investigates the presence of pastoral themes in Spenser’s prose dialogue, A View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596). Tracing the traditional pastoral themes of generational conflict, degeneration, and regeneration in Spenser’s late pastorals, this study considers how Spenser’s inclusion of these pastoral themes shape paradigms of reform in the View. It argues that generational conflict is exacerbated in the colonial space where degeneration is pervasive threatening both the self and the social structure of the English colonial project in Ireland. These connections to pastoral themes suggest that Spenser and his colonial peers, such as Lodowick Bryskett, conceive of their lives in pastoral terms intersected with imperial politics.

Abstract This paper considers how Spenser’s conception of conscience and universal law and justice in A View of the Present State of Ireland can be understood within the context of jurist Christopher St. German’s early sixteenth-century tract on equity and the common law and his subsequent tracts on the reformation of Church corruption. The paper attempts to re-situate Spenser’s engagement with legal and political theory within the context of English legal education as it had developed throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Ultimately, it shows that Spenser’s engagement with law, theology and politics reflected a commitment to a new Protestant conception of transnational Christendom as well as a re-conception of England as a Protestant nation within that transnational entity.

Abstract This article analyzes the View as an example of knowledge production, rather than plumbing it for representation or ideology as scholars have traditionally done. Tracing the process of construction, sources, and generic conventions that Spenser wielded not only illuminates some of the more curious elements of the View, but also reveals his practices and motivations for it. As this article suggests, such an approach reinforces the idea that Spenser designed the View as an appeal for the patronage and support of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, by modeling specific forms of expertise and counsel characteristic of the Essex circle.

Abstract This essay places Edmund Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland (1596) into conversation with John Jones’ 1579 nursing manual Arte and Science in order to contextualize Spenser’s medical solution to Irish rebellion. For both, the Irish wetnurse, who controlled the political system of fosterage undermining England’s agenda in Ireland, is central to the corporate identity of a conjoined Anglo-Irish kingdom. A View’s relationship to Jones’ text reveals the vexed ontological landscape of England’s early imperial self-fashioning, which linked the re-engineering of the genetic nature of colonial bodies to the management of women’s reproductive labor.

Abstract Scholars have long noted the eccentric vocabulary of Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland, primarily with an eye toward glossing words unfamiliar outside of a contemporary Irish context. This essay steps back from consideration of individual words to ponder what can be learned from word frequencies, primarily focusing on what the tools of corpus linguistics can tell us about the View and especially the View in relation to Spenser’s poetry. What words are most common in the View? What words in the View are most likely (or least likely) to occur in Spenser’s poetry? Is the vocabulary of Eudoxus similar to or notably different from the vocabulary of Irenius? What parts of Spenser’s poetic corpus have the greatest (or least) affinity, vocabulary-wise, with the View? This essay answers those questions and argues that linguistic analysis must go hand-in-hand with traditional close reading in order to draw conclusions from those answers.

Abstract When Elizabeth I visited the city of Norwich, she was publicly praised as a virgin queen for the first time in her reign. Although this image of Elizabeth becomes important to later historiography, this essay argues that there is a more sustained strand of royal myth-making in this visit that gives her even greater independent and specific political authority: that of an educated queen. At Norwich, Elizabeth was addressed more frequently in Latin than during any other visit during her reign, except for her visits to the universities. This essay analyzes the Latin texts to show how Norwich’s civic officials used this image to praise Elizabeth as a queen so individually powerful that she should commit more firmly to remaining a distinctly unmarried goddess of wisdom, a champion of Norwich, and the Nurse of God’s True (Protestant) Church. What goes unspoken is that she has no need for a foreign Catholic husband in the French Duke of Anjou—the context that underwrites the praise of her as a virgin queen. These Latin texts convey Elizabeth as a queen who has already the specific authority and nurturing care that give her distinctly peaceful nation all it needs to remain strong, prosperous, and religiously unified.