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Book Reviews : Contours and Contradictions

Spenser scholars have long argued about the poet’s religious stance. Current critical orthodoxy makes him an Anglican of the Hooker variety. In Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet, (Cambridge University Press [1984], fl8-50/$43.50, pp. 201, ISBN 0-521-25807-3), Dr Anthea Hume makes a convincing case for judging him a moderate Puritan. In the process she casts new light on several interpretative problems in the poetry. Examination of the ecclesiastical eclogues in ’The Shepheardes Calender’ leads to the conclusion that Spenser organizes the dialogues so as to ensure that the Puritan arguments emerge as the imaginatively persuasive ones (so much for the dictum that you can’t make poetry out of dogma). Spenser is not ambivalent, as often thought. Rather, he takes a firm moderate Puritan position. This is persuasive. ’The Faerie Queene’ is Spenser’s longest and most difficult work (not, I think, his finest), perhaps admired more than loved today. The diffuse and inchoate plot must surely be admitted and Dr Hume recognizes the problems. She proposes a fresh framework of reference for understanding the poem. Instead of the nature/grace tension we should read it as a treatise about growth in moral and social virtue following justification. This is most illuminating, though it means granting the ’Elves’ Christian status, which works very well for Guyon’s pilgrimage but leaves questions about Book II, canto X. An entirely