Purity, translation and dialectical rhetoric in Spenser's 'Well of English Undefyled'

This study examines the chiasmus of purity and translation in the history of classical rhetoric that influenced the development of vernacular humanism in the Renaissance and is exemplified in The Faerie Queene (Books I--II) by Edmund Spenser. The claim that purity and translation are bound together to form a repeated pattern of cultural appropriation is established by examining the inception of cultural and linguistic purity in classical Athens; examples supporting the argument include rhetorical texts and cultural readings of dialectical images including the virgin and the wellspring. In Latin rhetoric Cicero reiterates the translation of purity as the basis for appropriating and domesticating Greek rhetoric, which Quintilian legitimates in his magisterial codification, Institutio Oratoria. The pattern of purity through translation and appropriation reappears in the humanist turn to Cicero and Quintilian through recovery of Latin culture established by Petrarch and others in the early Italian Renaissance. The fifteenth century Ciceronian debates over the relation of Latin to the vernacular ignited the frenzy for purity in surrounding European vernacular languages. Rooted in the traditions of rhetoric that formed the centerpiece of Renaissance humanist education, purity functions as the linguistic and political means of translating classical humanism into the vernacular cultures of expanding European nationhood. Congruently, in the Scriptural tradition of the Reformation, purity legitimates the translation and authorization of the texts and doctrines of the early church. These traditions are fused in the northern humanist refinement of dialectical rhetoric begun by Lorenzo Valla and carried northward into Germany by Rudolph Agricola, where the new learning was put to powerful use in the educational and religious reforms of Philipp Melanchthon. Melanchthon's drive to realize purity through reformed religion and dialectical rhetoric participates in the literary amalgam of humanist rhetoric, vernacular purity, and religious aesthetics that was to become known as Spenser's "Well of English Undefyled." Vernacular humanism and competitive nationalism form the background of Spenser's effort to achieve pure and noble diction in English that resulted in his national romance epic, The Faerie Queene.