to extol the excellence of most chapters in part 2 and the collection as a whole. Even the few less successful pieces contain wonderful perceptions and are (like all but one or two) substantially responsive to other essays in the volume, enriching the collective pictures formed by the groupings of texts or travelers. Mary Fuller's afterword is a brilliant stroke of editorial care for the volume's contribution as a whole. Just as we start to hunger for meta-critical attention to the issue of the starved archive and the male-dominated literary canon, we hear from a scholar who combines, with a rare talent for both, fine training in literary and theoretical studies and wide experience in historiography. Her essay makes clear the paucity of resources, while providing a useful model for making the best possible use of what we have-even those of us with less ease of access to large research collections. More work needs to be done in the field staked out by this carefully crafted collection, and with the stimulating models it offers, and Fuller's attention to the process, it will be done.
This paper argues that Lodowick Bryskett's account of a conversation with Edmund Spenser in The Discourse of Civill Life (1606), in which a broadly Aristotelian ethical framework is coordinated with the social ends of the Protestant empire building, examines the collisions of humanist theory and governmental practice in the New English polity in Ireland. It interrogates both the possibility of a coherent philosophical foundation for political action and the transformative pressures exerted by the exercise of political power on those philosophical precepts. The Discourse thus shows the complex and contrasting ways in which two figures at the vanguard of Elizabethan moral philosophy, and on the fraught and violent front lines of Elizabethan imperial power, sought to mediate humanist ideals about the nature and practice of civil life with the daily exigencies of establishing and maintaining the early modern colonial state.
This essay reads Milton’s Eden as a critical appropriation of Spenser’s image of the mutable world. It argues that Edenic work epitomizes Milton’s engagement with Spenser’s poetry as a site of creative origins and reveals these poets’ common vision of poetry’s virtues as inseparable from individual experiences of freely interpreting images of creation. Linking Spenserian quest’s redemptive labor with the first parents’ work in Eden, it argues that Spenser bequeaths to Milton’s poetry a broadly georgic ethos in which virtue is discovered not in our encounters with transcendent forms but rather in our movements through the postlapsarian world.
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