Abstract
This chapter looks at Spenser’s animal writing through two related lenses. In the first place, it considers animal hermeneutics, using the influential work of Jill Mann to suggest the continuing vitality of medieval models of signification in the foxes and badgers of The Ruines of Time. Secondly, it looks in detail at the neglected Visions of the Worlds Vanitie sequence (also from Complaints) to suggest further connections with medieval genres in the shape of the bestiary. However, as the essay suggests, the detail of these poems works against the simplified moralizing they seem to evoke in favour of the destabilization of conventional hierarchies in ways which remain surprisingly unpredictable.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
My thanks to the editors and to Andrew Hadfield and Elisabeth Chaghafi for their instructive comments. For context, see Brown (1999); Rasmussen (2010). All quotations from Complaints are from Spenser (1989). Line numbers to individual poems are given parenthetically in text, preceded with the following abbreviations: RT (The Ruines of Time); VG (Virgils Gnat); MHT (Mother Hubberds Tale); VWV (Visions of the Worlds Vanitie); VP (Visions of Petrarch).
- 2.
For related approaches, Bennett (2010, viii, and passim).
- 3.
For Bartholomaeus’ popularity, see Mann (2009, 25–6).
- 4.
See further Mann (2009, 28–52).
- 5.
See Richard Schell’s perceptive introduction in Spenser (1989, 432).
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
See the presentation of other Complaints sonnet sequences, Ruines of Rome, and Visions of Bellay and Petrarch, as well as Visions of the Worlds Vanitie, in Spenser (1989) and Spenser (1999). Most French editions of Du Bellay in contrast count each new sonnet as a discrete text; see Du Bellay (2009), II, 3–32, for Les Antiquitez de Rome and ‘Le Songe’.
- 9.
The Bodleian copy misprints the siglum as ‘B3’ on X3r; the correct version is given in the Huntington Library copy reproduced in Early English Books Online.
- 10.
- 11.
The caveat is that none of the Visions has a separate title page, or letter of dedication; see Rasmussen (2010, 220–2).
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
For the connection of Visions of the Worlds Vanitie with Du Bellay, see Satterthwaite (1960, 113–32). Satterthwaite’s estimation of the sequence is relentlessly negative.
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
A weakness of all scholarly editions so far is their relatively fitful treatment of the sources for Visions of the Worlds Vanitie. I aim to address aspects of this in my forthcoming edition of Complaints, co-edited with Elisabeth Chaghafi (for Manchester University Press).
- 19.
Spenser (1999, 637). See Aesop (1998, 139). A hitherto unspotted source is a simile in Ovid’s Metamorphoses XI.332–36, when Daedalion tries to rush onto his daughter’s funeral pyre, and is compared with a bull (‘iuvencus’) stung by hornets (‘spicula crabronum’) into mad flight (‘ire fugae’). See Ovid (1984, 144–5), and, for Arthur Golding’s translation, Ovid (2002, 332): ‘as doth a bullock when/A hornet stings him in the neck’ (ll.387–8).
- 20.
See ‘breeze, n.1.’ OED.
- 21.
All quotations from The Faerie Queene are from Spenser (2007), with parenthetical references to book, canto, and stanza.
- 22.
See Miller (1990, 127–8), an exemplary summary of Calidore’s problematic heroism.
- 23.
The line includes further i-related assonance in the dipthong of ‘their’, and a long i-sound in ‘feeble’. My thanks to Elisabeth Chaghafi for this observation.
- 24.
See Dubow (2022) for an illuminating exploration of the tendency of alliteration (which is of course related to assonance) to overflow cultural and formal boundaries in Spenser’s epic.
- 25.
My emphasis.
- 26.
See Brown (2013, 47–57).
- 27.
See VB, ll.79–81, 159–61, 209–10; VP, ll.83–84, 97–98; and VWV, ll.2–7, 20–26, 62–67, 111–12, 153–54. My count excludes past participles in rhyming positions, because the evidence about how they were sounded is ambiguous. Amoretti on my reckoning has twenty one feminine rhymes, and only a couple of instances of two feminine rhymes in the same poem (sonnets LVIII and LXXXV).
- 28.
- 29.
- 30.
See Spenser (1591), title page, for this phrase as a general designation of the volume’s contents.
- 31.
Spenser (1999, 637).
- 32.
Bibliography
Aesop. 1998. The Complete Fables, trans. Olivia and Robert Temple. London: Penguin.
Bellamy, Elizabeth Jane. 2007. Spenser’s Open. SSt 22: 227–241.
Du Bellay, Joachim. 2009. Oeuvres Poétiques, two vols, ed. Daniel Aris. and Françoise Joukovsky. Paris: Classiques Garnier.
Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bernard, John D. 1989. Ceremonies of Innocence: Pastoralism in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brown, Richard Danson. 1999. The New Poet: Novelty and Tradition in Spenser’s Complaints. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
———. 2013. ‘Charmed with inchanted rimes’: An Introduction to the Faerie Queene Rhymes Concordance. In A Concordance to the Rhymes of ‘The Faerie Queene’, ed. Richard Danson Brown and J.B. Lethbridge. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
———. 2019. The Art of ‘The Faerie Queene’. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Campana, Joseph. 2015. Spenser’s Inhumanity. SSt 30: 277–299.
Crawford, Jason. 2017. Allegory and Enchantment: An Early Modern Poetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Danner, Bruce. 2011. Edmund Spenser’s War on Lord Burghley. London: Palgrave.
Dolven, Jeff. 2010. Spenser’s Metrics. In The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard A. McCabe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dubow, Bethany. 2022. Toadstool Poetics: Alliteration in The Faerie Queene. SSt 36: 91–135.
Grogan, Jane. 2009. Exemplary Spenser. Farnham: Ashgate.
Hadfield, Andrew. 2012. Edmund Spenser: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jack, R.D.S. 1990. Scottish Antecedents. In SENC, ed. A.C. Hamilton et al. Toronto: Toronto University Press.
Krier, Theresa M., ed. 1998. Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance. Gainsville: University Press of Florida.
Mann, Jill. 2009. From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McMullan, Gordon, and David Matthews, eds. 2007. Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Miller, David Lee. 1990. Calidore. In SENC, ed. A.C. Hamilton et al. Toronto: Toronto University Press.
Ovid. 1984. Metamorphoses Books IX-XV, trans. Frank Justus Miller. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 2002. Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding; ed. Madeleine Forey. London: Penguin.
Pliny the Elder. 1983. Natural History, Books VIII-XI, trans. H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Preston, Claire. 2010. Spenser and the Visual Arts. In The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard A. McCabe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rasmussen, Carl J. 1981. ‘How Weak Be the Passions of Woefulness’: Spenser’s Ruines of Time. SSt 2: 159–181.
Rasmussen, Mark David. 2010. Complaints and Daphnaïda. In The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard A. McCabe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Satterthwaite, Alfred W. 1960. Spenser, Ronsard, and Du Bellay: A Renaissance Comparison. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Spenser, Edmund. 1591. Complaints. Containing Sundrie Small Poemes of the Worlds Vanitie. London: William Ponsonby.
———. 1949. Prose Works, ed. Rudolf Gottfried. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
———. 1989. Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. New Haven: Yale University Press.
———. 1999. The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard A. McCabe. London: Penguin.
———. 2001; 2007. The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. Harlow: Longman.
Stein, Harold. 1934. Studies in Spenser’s Complaints. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stenner, Rachel, Tamsin Badcoe, and Gareth Griffith, eds. 2019. Rereading Chaucer and Spenser: Dan Geffrey with the New Poete. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Van Dorsten, Jan. 1990. Complaints: Visions. In SENC, ed. A.C. Hamilton et al. Toronto: Toronto University Press.
Wilson-Okamura, David Scott. 2013. Spenser’s International Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Yeats, W.B. 1983. The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran. London: Macmillan.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Brown, R.D. (2024). Scorned Little Creatures?: Insects and Genre in Complaints (1591). In: Stenner, R., Shinn, A. (eds) Edmund Spenser and Animal Life . Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42641-4_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42641-4_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-42640-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-42641-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)