Abstract
Edmund Spenser was one of the great poets of the Elizabethan era. His work draws on native, classical, and European traditions. The clearest example of Neoplatonism in Spenser’s writing comes in the Fowre Hymnes (1596). The first two of these, addressed to Love and Beauty (Cupid and Venus) present conventional depictions of the Platonic gaze ascending from the material to the intelligible realms. The second two, addressed to Christ and Sapience (Christian Wisdom), integrate Platonic ideas with Christian doctrines.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Primary Literature
Spenser, Edmund. 1989. The Yale edition of the shorter poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William Oram, Einar Bjorvand, and Ronald Bond. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Secondary Literature
Baldwin, Anna, and Sarah Hutton, eds. 1994. Platonism and the English Imagination. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Bennett, Josephine Waters. 1931. The theme of Spenser’s ‘Fowre hymnes’. Studies in Philology 28 (1): 18–57.
Borris, Kenneth, Jon A. Quitslund, Carol V. Kaske, William A. Oram, Anne Lake Prescott, and Thomas Roche, eds. 2009. Spenser studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual XXIV: Special issue: Spenser and Platonism. New York: AMS Press.
Bulger, Thomas. 1994. Platonism in Spenser’s Mutability Cantos. In Platonism and the English imagination, ed. Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton, 126–138. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dambe, Sira. 2009. Receptions of Plato in the English Renaissance: Spenser on Love and Beauty. Phronimon 10 (2): 31–46.
Ellrodt, Robert. 1960. Neoplatonism in the poetry of Spenser. Geneva: Droz.
Hadfield, Andrew. 2004. Spenser, Edmund (1552?–1599). In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Online edition, 2008.
Kaske, Carol V. 2000. Neoplatonism in Spenser once more. Religion and Literature 32 (2): 157–169.
Poetry Foundation. “Edmund Spenser”. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/edmund-spenser. Accessed 28 Feb 2017.
Quitslund, Jon A. 1973. Spenser’s Amoretti VIII and Platonic Commentaries on Petrarch. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36: 256–276.
Quitslund, Jon A. 2016. Spenser’s Supreme Fiction: Platonic Natural History and The Faerie Queene. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Hebron, M. (2022). Spenser, Edmund. In: Sgarbi, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14169-5_1147
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14169-5_1147
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-14168-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-14169-5
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities