The art of recollection: Ruin and cultural memory in Edmund Spenser's poetry

To see ruin is to see double: both a broken, irretrievable past and the desire for its wholeness. Or is it? This dissertation proposes that ruin represented more than an artistic impasse for early modern literature; rather than merely an absence that needed to be filled, ruin was itself a vital place for debating how cultures could remember the past. I argue that Spenser, though long seen as Virgil's heir for England, in fact uses "ruin" as a location for criticizing Virgilian models of cultural and imperial transmission. I explore how Spenser's poetry juxtaposes narratives of continuing ruin with fantasies of cultural repair---especially the claims to "empire without end" that poets and monarchs alike fashioned in imitation of Virgil---in order to demonstrate that cultures are not built once and forever from ruin but reside in ruin itself. Spenser approaches the topos of ruin through "the art of memory," drawing upon a tradition of using locational memory as a narrative about the architecture of cultural memory. Seeing the cultural ruins of the past not as fragments that can be permanently repaired but as materials for a dialogic process of recollection and renewal, Spenser suggests that immortality lies in ruin.;The first chapter, "The Death of the 'New Poete': Virgilian Ruin and Ciceronian Recollection in The Shepherded Calender," examines how Spenser's self-conscious debutante collection of poetry articulates cultural hopes and fears about Virgilian imitation. Particularly through his characters' desire to locate a "new" Virgil to repair England's ruined culture, and their anxiety that none exists, Spenser tacitly engages his characters in dialogue, answering their fantasy of heroic, individual authorship---the Virgilian poet who builds a "place" for cultural memory by repairing past ruin---with Ciceronian and Platonic arts of memory. As I argue, the inter-textual presence of Cicero's De Oratore and Plato's Phaedrus present a different version of immortality than Spenser's characters hope for: not permanence, but ongoing recollection.;The second chapter, "'The Methode[s] of the Poet Historical': Competing Versions of History in The Faerie Queene," considers Spenser's epic revision of imperial permanence. Calling upon Augustine's major works, Spenser criticizes imperial uses of Virgilian fictions of history, specifically the replicated Trojan "ancestry" evoked to claim "endless" empire, as well as the means this end justified. Arguing that Spenser's contrast between the method of a "Poet historical" and "Historiographer" draws attention to The Faerie Queene 's concern with how fiction "orders" history, I examine Spenser's representation of English history in Books II and III, which present history out of order to reveal the historical and theological fictions girding imperial revivals of national "Trojan" genealogies.;The fourth chapter, "Two Cities, Two Theaters for Worldlings: Complaints of ruin and the Architecture of Immortality," considers how the Complaints encapsulates debates about Rome's ruin and Virgil's legacy: the problem of reconciling Virgil's fiction of "eternal" Rome with its long history of ruination, the issue of how Christians and Protestants appropriated Virgil's fiction of history. As I argue, the Complaints responds to Jan van der Noot's Theatre for Worldlings with a competing "memory theater" offering an alternative vision of how ruins translate through time and space. Against Van der Noot's apocalyptic perspective, Spenser suggests how ruins build new edifices in time, effecting immortality by conveying memory.