Spenser and the Renaissance 'Aeneid'

How did the tradition of adaptation and commentary that grew up around the Aeneid in the medieval and early modern periods shape Spenser's conception of his own epic, The Faerie Queene? Studies of Virgil's influence on Spenser have multiplied in the last decade, but are frequently marred by the unspoken assumption that the poet encountered his predecessor's text in isolation. This study, by contrast, locates Spenser in the context of a larger interpretive community, which I reconstruct from the materials that accompanied Virgil's text in early printed editions. As such, it represents an attempt to wed reception history with more traditional methods of source study.;I begin with a bibliographical analysis of the commentaries that were available in England at this time, and with a survey of Virgil criticism in the period, concentrating on the theoretical writings of sixteenth-century critics in England and Italy. In chapter two, I take up a single episode from the epic, the hero's descent to the underworld in Aeneid 6, in order to show how Spenser tried, not merely to reproduce scenes and images from the Virgilian episode, but to reproduce the function of scenes and images, as these were understood by the best classical scholarship of his own time. Having considered Spenser's approach to particulars, I turn in chapter three to larger questions of genre and interpretation. What did it mean to read Virgil's account of the colonization of Italy in an age of imperial expansion (whether in Spenser's Ireland, or the New World)? How did early modern exegetes of Virgil's poem differ from their medieval predecessors? Finally, what was the impact of medieval romance on humanistic conceptions of the epic, and what form did it take? Having suggested that the printed editions of the renaissance reinscribed a medieval ideal of erotic rehabilitation, I argue in chapter four that Spenser attempts a complementary rehabilitation (of anger) in his treatment of the Bower of Bliss and its destruction, an episode which both recapitulates contemporary debates about the conclusion to Virgil's epic, and challenges longstanding assumptions about the legitimacy of anger and revenge in Reformation England.