The knight's landscape: Exploring the rhetoric of place in Book VI of Spenser's 'The Faerie Queene' and Sidney's 'Arcadia'

In the Defence of Poetry, Sidney praises the poet's ability to create a second "golden" world (343) because such a power sets him apart from both the historian and the philosopher. This thesis explores how second worlds of Fairyland and Arcadia in Book VI of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Philip Sidney's Arcadia serve as poetic evidence of Sidney's literary theory. Using the conceptual framework of Plato's tripartite soul and the emblematic framework of Raphael's Dream of Scipio and The Three Graces , this thesis attempts to provide a definition of the rhetoric of place in both texts. As the knights move through the various landscapes they inhabit, they also occupy the three roles of a scholar, a soldier, and a lover. Each role has a particular physical as well as rhetorical topos associated with it, and this study shows how the knight both affects and is affected by physical geography. Providing a definition of the rhetoric of place is a fairly interdisciplinary endeavour, and so the argument draws on evidence from Renaissance literary theory, early modern cartography, art history, landscape design, and modern criticism. Chapter I focuses on how the landscape serves as a text to be read, but also on how the knights must themselves be scholars and poets. Chapter II explores the landscape of battle, and how it tests the princes' virtue in Arcadia and Calidore's courtesy in Book VI of The Faerie Queene . Chapter III relies most heavily on the visual arts to explore the landscape of love and the locus amoenus. Finally, the Conclusion unites the three roles and offers the final definition of the rhetoric of place.