Reviewed by: Spenserian Moments by Gordon Teskey Paul J. Hecht Spenserian Moments. By Gordon Teskey. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2019. xiii+529 pp. $45; £36.95. ISBN 978–0–674–98844–6. Spenserian Moments collects essays from a thirty-year period, many substantially revised, into a volume that also contains approximately five chapters of entirely new material. The opening section of the book, where the new writing is concentrated, gives us a chance to see this esteemed critic of Milton and Spenser approach topics that we have not seen him approach before. Because many of the collected and revised essays have stood the test of time and deserve to be better known, the volume will therefore be valuable to Spenser scholars, to scholars relatively new to Spenser, and also to teachers and students. The last two kinds of reader may be drawn to Gordon Teskey because he is an extremely resourceful analogist, who supplies a great quantity of ways of framing and conceptualizing the workings of, especially, The Faerie Queene. Some of the best of these analogies—mountains with 'plenty of weather' (p. 12), or a chemical quincunx with freely floating electrons (p. 4)—are born of comparisons with Paradise Lost, the poem that has been the other steady focus of Teskeyʼs career. The centrality and power of his analogies show off Teskeyʼs devotion to teaching, which also explains the care and quality of his writing, learned but generous. Innovative analogy also shows off an approach to criticism that has much in common with the poetry he writes about. Since Teskey sees The Faerie Queene as a poem fundamentally and brilliantly resistant to scheme, he has allowed himself to use an approach built on 'moments', gathering a constellation of analyses and thought rather than a strict argumentative sequence. The result is consistently satisfying, [End Page 279] often surprising, and at times provoking. A couple of highlights of the former two: an essay on 'thinking moments' shows Teskey in dazzling form, taking energy from Romantic views of Spenser, and aesthetic theory that extends from Plato to Hegel, Heidegger, and Adorno; an essay on death and allegory contains an unforgettable reading of the near-death of the Knight of Temperance in Book ii of 'The Faerie Queene. Where there is provocation, for me it comes from places where Teskey has allowed things to get either a little loose or a little too strict. Teskey can be brilliant about the sexual dynamics of Spenser, using gender as a large-scale structuring analogy for 'The Faerie Queene early in the book. However gender and sexuality do not reside in his work on Spenser in the same way that, say, Irish studies does—which has given us an excellent chapter in which he engages with this major area of new Spenser scholarship of the last few decades. So some remarks about women and sexuality—e.g. Acrasia, Elizabeth Boyle—are made as though there is not ongoing thinking about these topics as fierce as there is about Spenser and Ireland. Meanwhile, on the slightly too strict side of things, Teskey alludes to the sexual dynamics of the Aeneid as though that were a settled matter and not a site of ongoing debate. I will allow myself to pick one more bone: in the chapter on colonial allegories in Paris, an unexpected and delightful Spenserianʼs tour guide to the city, he disputes a manifesto made on behalf of non-Western works of art that was part of the ongoing effort by Paris to address its colonial past and its continuing status as capital of global art. Teskey is incensed by the way the manifesto conflates the rights of human beings and those of works of art, a conflation which he calls 'the height of absurdity' (p. 365). Nonetheless, I wonder: the decades Teskey has given to becoming a reader adequate to The Faerie Queene, an accomplishment so richly on display throughout this book, seem to reflect a devotion to art that is at the very least comparable to what a human being deserves. Why should not it be an appropriate task to treat works of art with...
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