Cascading Hazards: Earthquakes, Allegory, and the Steadfast Globe

Abstract

This essay proposes that Redcrosse's battles with the multi-hazard threat of the flesh, the world, and the devil can be read as subject to what twenty-first-century theorists of risk modelling describe as "cascade" effects. It reads the earth-shaking imagery of Spenser's Legend of Holiness in light of the literature produced in response to the 1580 earthquake, contending that early modern attitudes to an unsettled planet can illuminate in more precise terms both the threat, and the potential recovery, embodied by Spenser's treatment of the deadly sin of pride.For the 1580 earthquake respondents, natural disasters invited tentative construals concerning the consequences of human behavior, as situated in ethical and eschatological, rather than solely environmental, terms. As a cataclysmic force that vanished, leaving only ruin, the earthquake gave shape to interpretative strategies alert to the difficulties of reading signs, casting aspects of Spenser's allegorical work into sharp relief.At the close of A Shorte and Pithie Discourse, concerning the Engendring, Tokens, and Effects of all Earthquakes in Generall, Thomas Twyne turns his mind to the conditionone both physical and existentialcreated by the experience of feeling ground once thought steadfast, shudder and pitch:[…] let the worldly man consider, what certentie he hath in his ritches, or assurance in any thing upon the earth, when as even that also is subject to shaking and moving, wheron hee reposeth his felicitie. And although the witte of man have devised remedies against the threatninges of Heaven: yet when the earth quaketh, where shall hee repose himselfe in safety? 1 Twyne's alarm was provoked by the earthquake that struck north-western Europe in April 1580, and prompted a desire that his fellow citizens would now live "not altogeather in