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.
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References
Primary Literature
Spenser, Edmund. 1989. In The Yale edition of the shorter poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William Oram, Einar Bjorvand, and Ronald Bond. New Haven: Yale University Press.
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Online
Online biography of Spenser. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/edmund-spenser. Accessed 28 Feb 2017.
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Hebron, M. (2017). Spenser, Edmund. In: Sgarbi, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_1147-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_1147-1
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