Spenser's Phantastic History, The Ruines of Time, and the Invention of Medievalism

Abstract

There is not in this country any monuments of antiquity left, but certain fabulous histories and that lately written. -Bishop RobinsonFor that at my late being there, I espied an heap of old papers and parchments . . . now my fantasie is, that in some of them will be some mention made of Noble men and Jentelmen of those days. Whereby (eyther for chronicle, or pedigree) some good matter be collected out of them by me (at my leysor) by way of a recreation.-Doctor Dee at Wigmore Abbey When Bishop Robinson responded to Archbishop Parker's request for information about the existence of "ancient records and monuments," he essentially outlined the great hermeneutical problem that haunted latesixteenth-century English antiquarians. 1 Many of the documents, records and monuments had vanished or, worse yet, been destroyed in the interests of the Reformation. Those monuments that did survive were often dismissed as products of "abbie-lubbers," romances that failed to live up to the new humanistic standards of history. 2 What disqualified these romances as history was their fabulous, that is, lying, nature. Indeed, as a number of critics have pointed out, the great danger was that they might be believed. Yet, this destruction or dismissal of monuments presented something of a problem. For without monuments, one can have no history. 3 One writer who offered a strategy for a history in the absence of monuments was Edmund Spenser. Like Doctor Dee, he phantasized about the substance of things unseen and created his own history, indeed his own chronicle. 4 Most early