A number of recent studies of gender roles in The Faerie Queene have concentrated on what has been perceived as the narrator's shifting (and perhaps shifty) appraisal of women's ability to rule.¹ In Book III, the narrator suggests that women are at least as capable as men in “warlike armes,” the “artes,” and “pollicy”—which are, of course, the principal areas in which a Renaissance prince was expected to excel (ii.2).² In Book V, however, the narrator seems to retreat from the conclusion implicit in his earlier claims, saying of women that “wise Nature did them strongly bynd, / T'obay the heasts of mans well ruling hand” (v.25).

Although the apparent shift in the poet's attitude has been the subject of a good deal of critical debate, little has been resolved. Some scholars (best represented by Susanne Woods) see an outright contradiction between the two books, although perhaps one that is part of an intentional dialectic with the reader.³ Others argue that, by and large, Spenser takes a consistent stand on the issue, although there has been considerable disagreement about the nature of his position. On the one hand, Josephine Roberts⁴ stresses details that make the poet's views seem closest to those of relatively liberal Anglicans, whose principal spokesman, Bishop John Aylmer, argues that nothing in divine or natural law denies women the right to rule and that they have done so ably “in al ages, in many countreis, and vnder euery monarck[y].”⁵ J. E. Phillips and Pamela Benson,⁶ on the other hand, ally the poet with the conservative reformer John Calvin, who regards women's rule as a deviation from the proper order of nature, although one that God occasionally brings about “to condemn the inactivity of men, or for the better setting forth his own glory.”⁷

To dispel the impression of inconsistency between Books III and V, such scholars have had to interpret one or the other of the stanzas in question in special ways. Roberts, for example, dismisses the passage opposing women's rule in Book V as nothing more than “the narrator's immediate, impassioned reaction to the humiliation of Artegall.”⁸ By contrast, those who accept a Calvinist reading regard the stanza in Book V as the clearest statement of the poet's position, and treat the praises of women's abilities in Book III as limited to the great women of antiquity and a scattering of more recent queens, such as Matilda and Elizabeth.⁹ According to this interpretation, Spenser may well have admired certain female rulers, but he was still committed to the general proposition that “wise Nature” binds women to obedience “Vnlesse the heauens them lift to lawfull soueraintie” (v.25).

Although I admire the scholarship that has been brought forth in support of the Anglican and Calvinist positions, I have never been quite comfortable with either one, since I suspect that their proponents too hastily dismiss, or too narrowly circumscribe, one or the other of the statements about women that other scholars find troubling. I would like to propose a different way to reconcile Books III and V, one that seems to me truer to the language of the passages in question. Before I do, however, I must again raise the difficult issue of Spenser's religious position, for it seems to me that we cannot make much progress until we recognize that the relevant passages in The Faerie Queene do not accord very well either with the views of the liberal Anglicans or with those of the moderate Calvinists.

The contrasts stand out most clearly when we consider not just general statements about the nature of women, their capacities, and their proper role in the public sphere, but also the authors' interpretations of key biblical texts on those issues. In the sixteenth-century controversy over women's rule, the Bible was central to the debate. In responding to it, both sides had to contend with a number of texts that were not easy to harmonize: the opening chapters of Genesis, which depict the relationship between the genders before and after the Fall; the Old Testament accounts of female judges, prophets, and queens; the verses in the Epistles of St. Paul that set forth women's proper role in church polity; and the New Testament passages on the equality of the sexes after Christ's Second Coming. As historians of Reformation theology such as John Lee Thompson and Jane Dempsey Douglass have recently shown, the book of Genesis and the Pauline Epistles were sites of particularly contentious debate.¹⁰ Since these texts figure prominently in my analysis of Spenser's position, I begin with them. I then contrast the stands of Aylmer and Calvin on the issues raised by the biblical passages with the much more complex views implicit in The Faerie Queene. Finally, I analyze a series of idealized female rulers in Book V, arguing that they best illustrate the differences between Spenser's position and those held by most Anglican and Protestant churchmen in his day.

II

The book of Genesis offers a good deal of support for the view that the rule of men over women—whether in the home or in society at large—was not part of the original order of creation. For one thing, God commands both sexes to “subdue” the earth and to “rule ouer” it (1.26, 28, Geneva version).¹¹ For another, he creates male and female in his own “image” and according to his own “lickenes” (1.26), and since one of God's primary capacities is governing, the fact that women share the divine image suggests that they also share the ability to rule. Finally, the rule of husbands over wives does not begin until after the Fall. When God punishes Eve for eating the forbidden fruit, saying, “thy desire shal be subiect to thine housband, and he shal rule ouer thee” (3.16), the statement implies that Adam has previously held no such sway. Woman's subjection is a consequence of the Fall and is therefore to be regarded, not as a good in its own right, but as the withdrawal of a good. Prior to the Fall, neither gender had dominion over the other because both were expected to subject their desires and their will entirely to God.

To be sure, differences in the treatment of the genders are implicit from the outset. In the interval before the Fall, God spends more time with Adam than with Eve, allowing him to witness the creation of the garden of Eden and its inhabitants and to name the animals and birds (2.7-8, 15-20). God also designates Eve as a “help” to Adam and gives to him alone the command about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, apparently expecting him to communicate it to his spouse (cf. 2.16-17 and 3.2-3). Clearly, however, such priority in knowledge and experience is not sufficient to establish the “rule” or “dominion” of Adam over Eve, for that begins only after the Fall.

Evidence of the initial parity of the genders may be found in the letters of St. Paul. According to the Epistle to the Colossians, the divine “image” in human beings, which has been defaced by Original Sin, will be renewed “When Christ which is our life, shal appeare” (3.4). Once restored to their first perfection, people will no longer be divided or bound in subjection to one another. Paul writes, “Lie not one to another, seing that ye haue put of[f] the olde man with his workes, And haue put on the newe, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him, Where is nether Grecian nor Iewe, circumcision nor vncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bonde, fre: but Christ is all and in all things” (9-11, my italics). In a similar passage in Galatians the Apostle applies this process of unification and equalization to the genders as well. There he writes, “all ye that are baptized into Christ, haue put on Christ. There is nether Iewe nor Grecian: there is nether bonde nor fre: there is nether male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Iesus” (3.27-28). In Christ, then, the old distinctions between chosen and not-chosen, freemen and slaves, no longer pertain, and neither do those between men and women. Just as the human race was one in the beginning, created in a single divine image and ruled by God alone, so it will be in the end—at least for those who have “put on Christ.”

Now it is important to note two points on which Paul remains silent. First, he does not extend the principle that man should rule over woman from the family to the state. One might argue, of course, that if wives are barred from rule in the home, then Paul can hardly have intended that women should rule in the state. Since the demands of the two settings are different, however, biblical commentators who take that position have generally felt obliged to seek support elsewhere—notably in Paul's discussions of male “headship,” in his strictures against allowing women to speak in church, and in his requirement that they cover their heads in the congregation.¹² Since these passages address the role of woman in the church rather than in the state, and since the Old Testament treats women rulers such as Esther and Deborah favorably, the evidence remains inconclusive. Second, although Paul discusses the beginning and the end of the process by which male and female are to become equal, he is silent on the intervening stages. The relevant passage in Galatians states that the return to Eden begins in baptism, when Original Sin is washed away and believers “put on Christ.” As the parallel passage from Colossians suggests, however, baptism is not necessarily sufficient to release wives from subjection. The Greek participial form anakainoumenon, which the Geneva version renders “is renewed,” implies that baptized believers are still in the process of “being renewed.” Paul's stress falls, in fact, on the last stage of the transformation, when Christ will come again “in glory” (3.3-4, 10). Nonetheless, a process of sanctification leading up to this final stage is clearly implied, and to the extent that both genders are being restored to the image of God, they might be expected to share more equally in matters of governance.

Now this line of reasoning is not one followed by most Protestant biblical commentators in Spenser's day. Although most accept the Pauline teaching that distinctions based on gender—including the so-called “curse of Eve”—will pass away at Christ's return, few concede that even the unfallen Eve shared in God's iustitia. To avoid the implication that the rule of men is a consequence of the Fall, they tend to slant their interpretations of Genesis, first by excluding the capacity to govern from the list of attributes inherent in the “image of God”¹³ and then by contending that Adam's “rule” over Eve is simply the heightening of a natural authority that he enjoyed from the outset.¹⁴ Such views are frequently tied to Paul's statement in 1 Corinthians 11.7 that “[the man] is the image and glorie of God: but the woman is the glorie of the man.” Although nothing can logically be derived from the Apostle's failure to say here that the woman is also the image of God, most sixteenth-century Protestant commentators take the passage to imply that women are not like God in the same sense that men are.¹⁵ Few, therefore, even consider the possibility that, as women are “renewed” in the image of God, they might take on more responsibility in matters of governance. Since God has not exempted believers from “sorrow in childbirth” or from the other punishments imposed in Genesis 3.16-20, commentators generally regard any attempt to lessen women's subjection before the Last Judgment as an evasion of divine justice.¹⁶

Nonetheless, interpretations that presuppose an initial ruling parity between the sexes and treat the Second Coming as a return to that prelapsarian state were well known in the sixteenth century. They had, in fact, been widely disseminated from the patristic period on, principally through the influence of St. John Chrysostom.¹⁷ Although no supporter of women's rule in the present state of the world, Chrysostom concedes that before the fall the genders were equal in rank and authority. In his Homilies on Genesis he states that, even before creating the first woman, God intended that she share in his governance (archên). In a later passage from the same work, he imagines God reproaching Eve after the Fall: “In the beginning I created you equal in esteem to your husband, and my intention was that in everything you would share with him as an equal, and as I entrusted control of everything to your husband, so did I to you; but you abused your equality of status. Hence I subject you to your husband. … Because you abandoned your equal … I now subject you to him in future and designate him as your master.”¹⁸ Only a small step was required to see the ultimate equality promised to women in the Pauline Epistles, then, as a return to this Edenic state. From the fact that Protestant commentators of the sixteenth century so often feel the need to argue against such egalitarian readings, we may infer that they were widely known.¹⁹

Spenser rejects the position of most of his usual religious allies on this issue and adopts one that better accords with an interpretation of Genesis like that of Chrysostom. He regards the Fall as a lengthy process in which, having lost Paradise, men and women gradually lose their parity as well. Although he speaks of the women of antiquity as men's equals, and sometimes even their superiors, he also asserts that they have since been deprived of liberty and hindered in developing their full capacities:

          by record of antique times I finde
          That women wont in warres to beare most sway,
          And to all great exploits them selues inclind:
          Of which they still the girlond bore away,
          Till enuious Men fearing their rules decay,
          Gan coyne streight lawes to curb their liberty;
          Yet sith they warlike armes haue layd away:
          They haue exceld in artes and pollicy,
That now we foolish men that prayse gin eke t'enuy.

(ii.2)

As the story of Britomart and Artegall makes clear, however, the poet does not think that women should languish in this diminished state until the Second Coming. Unlike most Protestants of his day, Spenser laments the subordination of women and supports a restoration of their original “liberty.” Unlike most of his contemporaries who advocate women's rule, however, he thinks the abilities of women so little developed in his own day that only the most exceptional are ready to take an active role in public affairs. A comparison of his views with those of Calvin and Aylmer reveals the unusual nature of his position.

III

Even when Spenser praises the achievements of women, as he does in Book III, his position bears little resemblance to that of John Aylmer. In supporting women's rule, the Bishop concedes that it causes some “inconuenience” because the requisite virtues are “moore in the man then in the woman.”²⁰ The disparity is not great, however, as he demonstrates by citing a long list of successful female rulers from antiquity to the present day. From their numbers and the variety of the cultures that they represent, he concludes that “by the wholle consent of nacyons, by the ordinaunce of God, and order of lawe, wemen haue reigned and those not a fewe, and as it was thought not against nature.”²¹ Spenser clearly disagrees. In the opening stanzas of Book III, Canto ii (cited above), he claims that, far from being inferior in the virtues needed to rule, ancient women often excelled over men.²² He also rejects the view that in all ages women have ruled by “the wholle consent of nacyons” and “order of lawe.” Since he believes that, from an early date, women aroused men's envy and were subject to “streight lawes to curb their liberty,” he sees progressive erosion in their participation in public affairs. In the much discussed passage reproving the Amazons in Book V, moreover, he explicitly denies Aylmer's conclusion that women's rule is “not against nature,” insisting instead that

Such is the crueltie of womenkynd,
          When they haue shaken off the shamefast band,
          With which wise Nature did them strongly bynd,
          T'obay the heasts of mans well ruling hand,
          That then all rule and reason they withstand,
          To purchase a licentious libertie.
          But vertuous women wisely vnderstand,
          That they were borne to base humilitie,
Vnless the heauens them lift to lawfull soueraintie.

(v.25)

Although Roberts dismisses this stanza as an uncharacteristic outburst prompted by the Amazons' abuse of Artegall, the narrator's tone hardly seems impulsive or angry. He pauses in his narrative to assess not just Radigund and her followers, but all of “womenkynd,” and the tendencies that concern him are not simply the “inconueniences” that Aylmer concedes but a tendency to rebel against reason itself. Whereas the Bishop treats women's rule as a universal practice, the poet thinks it a departure from the prevailing order—and one that ought not to be undertaken without the sanction of “the heauens.”

To be sure, the passage leaves open more possibilities for women that some critics have supposed. Since Book III questions the justice of the laws that men have “coyned” against women, the phrases “lawfull soueraintie” and “mans well ruling hand” may presuppose a more liberal social order than that which currently prevails. In that case, women may have a right to rise to sovereignty more frequently than has recently been allowed. The role of “the heauens” in raising women to power is also ambiguous. It may entail a rare and specific act of divine providence, like that by which Deborah was made Judge over Israel, or a more common and general one by which women are freed from unjust constraints and restored to the possibility of lawful sovereignty. The observation that “vertuous women wisely vnderstand, / That they were borne to base humilitie” might be thought to militate against this reading, but it too is ambiguous. It may mean that women are bound to obey men in the ideal order of things, or simply in the fallen order imposed until people “put on Christ” and are renewed. If the latter, then women may only be required to obey men until the heavens have restored the genders to a state more nearly like that which they enjoyed in Eden.

I will return to these issues, but for the moment, it is sufficient to note the differences between Spenser's position and that of Aylmer. The Bishop thinks women's rule a universal phenomenon altogether in accord with nature and the inherent abilities of women, whereas the poet sees it as a departure from the prevailing order of things and one that is to be undertaken only with the assent of higher powers.²³ Despite his glowing accounts of women's inherent potential, Spenser clearly holds the actual abilities of most sixteenth-century women in rather low esteem. As Pamela Benson has noted, he often expresses admiration for women of the ancient world, but rarely for those of recent times, of whom he complains,

Where is the Antique glory now become,
          That whilome wont in women to appeare?
          Where be the braue atchieuements doen by some?
If they be dead, then woe is me therefore:
          But if they sleepe, O let them soone awake.

(III.iv.1-2)

Where the Bishop sees a history of women's ongoing ability and achievement, the poet sees a record of steep decline.

It is Spenser's view of the ongoing nature of the Fall that most clearly distinguishes him from Aylmer. As the poet suggests in surveying successive ages of the erotic art in the House of Busirane, the history of relations between the sexes has been one of progressive degradation. In the “goodly arras” of the first room, we glimpse such relations in antiquity, when gods and men first succumbed to the power of Cupid. As we proceed through the tapestries, the males become more lustful, bestial, and domineering and the females more fearful, subservient, and debased (III.xi.27-50). In the end this first era of decline leads to a state in which “Kings Queenes, Lords Ladies, Knights and Damzels gent / Were heap'd together with the vulgar sort, / And mingled with the raskall rablement” (46). In the second room a subsequent period continues the descent, proceeding from the vulgar and bestial to the “monstrous” (51).

Whereas for Spenser the Fall has changed women profoundly, for Aylmer it has had minimal effect, at least in their ability to govern. In commenting on Genesis 3.16, the Bishop takes God's statement to Eve “thy desire shal be subiect to thine housband, and he shal rule ouer thee” to mean simply that, despite the pains of childbirth, women will continue to seek sexual intimacy with their husbands.²⁴ In this way he eliminates the issue of female obedience altogether. Although he later concedes that the passage may also be taken to imply male authority within the family, he denies any such implication for the state. A queen may be obliged to obey her husband at home, but he argues that at court she may rightly say, “Law make my husband to obey, for heare he is not my hed, but my subiect.”²⁵

If the idealized image of womanhood in the figure of Britomart is any indication, Spenser once again disagrees. Although the Briton Princess stands to inherit a kingdom, she defers to her future husband in matters of direct rule. When, for example, she overthrows the tyrant Radigund and gains power over the city of the Amazons, she immediately relinquishes authority to a group of male magistrates headed by Artegall. If, moreover, the prophecies of Isis Church are to be believed, Britomart will never seek to exercise royal authority over her husband in the way suggested by Aylmer, not even after she sits in her father's throne. Instead, she will divide the labor of ruling with him as the moon-goddess Isis does with the sun-god Osyris. In this arrangement the masculine figure exercises justice and the feminine figure clemency or judicial equity, which tempers the harshness of the legal code as extenuating circumstances warrant. Although Spenser says of Isis and Osyris that “both like race in equall iustice runne” (V.vii.1-4), their essential equality still allows differences in force and prominence. The sun is, after all, larger and more dazzling than the moon, although no more important as an astrological influence. In the same way Artegall will apparently be “first among equals” once Britomart takes him “to [her] loued fere, / And ioyne[s] in equall portion of [her] realme” (23). According to Merlin's prophecy in Book III, she will rule alone at his death (iii.28-29). While he lives, however, she will not claim the sort of preeminence enjoyed by the queen in Aylmer's treatise who says, “Law make my husband to obey.”

Spenser's disagreements with the Bishop are also apparent in the poet's account of “Eden Lond” in Book I. In the theological allegory its King and Queen represent fallen humanity. He is the “old Adam” and she the “old Eve,” and both are held in bondage to the “old serpent” Satan. Their savior, the Red Crosse Knight, is in turn associated with the “new Adam,” or Christ, and their daughter Una with the “new Eve,” or the true church. For our purposes, the primary point to observe is the contrast between the conduct of the old Eve and that of the new. Although Una's mother is more than once referred to as Queen of Eden Lond, she takes no part in ruling the kingdom. Instead she seems to live under the “curse of Eve,” remaining silent and passive and, so far as we can tell, leaving matters of state to her husband. Una, however, is far more engaged in public affairs, having initiated and guided the attempt to liberate Eden with the assistance of the Red Crosse Knight. Since she is not only a figure for the Church but also, as her knight's erotic dreams about her suggest, a flesh and blood representative of regenerate womanhood, her energetic and active leadership implies that women need not wait for the Second Coming to begin their renewal. If, after all, her promised marriage to the Red Crosse Knight refers to the final union of Christ with the church, then the Second Coming still lies in the future. Active in the kingdom as she is, however, she is not like Aylmer's exemplary queen. In the judgment of Duessa and other matters, she continues to defer to her father and her intended husband. Although the idealized women of The Faerie Queene have the ability to rule alone, only the widowed and the unmarried actually do. The others exercise their authority in ways that complement that of their husbands.

IV

Although Aylmer's views are far from Spenser's, Calvin's seem somewhat closer. As Benson and Phillips have noted, the comments on women's rule in Book V of The Faerie Queene resemble statements by Calvin in a letter of 1559 to Lord Burghley in which the Swiss reformer assures the English government that he does not oppose the fledgling rule of Queen Elizabeth. He maintains that governance by women is a “deviation” from the “proper order of nature,” but he concedes that there have occasionally been female rulers “so endowed, that the singular good qualities which shone forth in them made it evident that they were raised up by divine authority.”²⁶ Spenser takes a similar line when he attributes the subordination of women to “wise Nature,” but he leaves open the possibility that the heavens may raise them to sovereignty. There, however, the similarities between the two writers end.

Unlike Calvin, Spenser idealizes antiquity and longs for its recovery. In the Proem to Book V, he praises the glories of “the golden age, that first was named” (V.proem.2) and exalts the reign of Elizabeth as a return to ancient ideals of justice and peace (9-11). That this passage reflects a deeply held personal mythology is confirmed in a letter by Gabriel Harvey, who as early as 1580 complains to the poet, “You suppose the first age was the goulde age. … You suppose it a foolish madd world, wherein all thinges ar overrulid by fansye.”²⁷ For Calvin, however, the reign of Saturn never occurred, and the subordination of women is necessary because of inadequacies in their nature far more profound than he lets on in his cautiously diplomatic note to Burghley. In his view God's reasons for occasionally exalting women to positions of authority have less to do with their native capacities than with God's intent to glorify himself or to “reproach the inactivity of men.” We get a fuller view of this line of reasoning in a sermon on 1 Timothy 2.13ff., in which Calvin likens the raising up of the judge and prophet Deborah to God's miraculous use of stones, fools, and mutes to speak for him. In such instances, according to Calvin, the Lord calls on something to do His will that lacks “intrinsic skill” (artifice), thus “perverting” the order of nature.²⁸ Spenser, however, seems to think that women once ruled on the basis of such intrinsic skill and may do so again, if only they will “awake.”

To be sure, Book V also asserts that “wise Nature” ordains that women obey men. As we have seen, however, the stanza in question does not make clear which sense of the notoriously treacherous term “nature” Spenser has in mind. It might refer to the perfect order of things as first created by God, or to the fallen order of subsequent history. The latter meaning seems preferable, however, because it allows a rather simple resolution to the apparent contradictions on this issue between Books III and V. If we assume that Spenser meant to draw the traditional distinction between Nature and Grace²⁹—between the order of the world as we know it and the order that “the heavens” will bring forth as the world is renewed—then his praise for the abilities of ruling women in antiquity and his concern that contemporary women remain subordinate are not incompatible. He may simply have thought obedience wise until such abilities have once again been awakened. On this interpretation, the primary difference between the two writers is that Calvin sees the subordination of women continuing until the end of time, whereas Spenser sees it being gradually relaxed as grace brings sanctification and renewal.

The contrast between the two writers on this point emerges most clearly when we contrast images of Edenic perfection and apocalyptic renewal in The Faerie Queene with those in Calvin's biblical commentaries. Calvin holds that women were created in the image of God, but he denies that the Hebrew term rendered as “image” in Genesis 1 includes the capacity for rule. He takes it, instead, to refer to the “righteousness and true holiness” of Adam and Eve.³⁰ Acknowledging that Eve's role as a “help suitable” for Adam suggests “some equality” (aliquid aequabile)³¹ and conceding that the woman was endowed with sufficient mental ability to be a close companion to her husband, he nonetheless denies the obvious implication of Genesis 3.16 that Adam did not “rule over” Eve until after the Fall. On this point he says, “[Eve] had, indeed, previously been subject to her husband, but that was a liberal and gentle subjection; [with the Fall], however, she is cast into servitude.”³² The same bias is apparent in Calvin's commentaries on the New Testament, particularly in passages in which he discusses the status of women in the Kingdom of God. Although he does not deny the equality of the genders once Christ returns, he aligns himself with most other Protestants of his day in asserting that, until the world passes away, women must remain subservient to men.³³ As Douglass notes, Calvin softens a number of the harshest attitudes toward women held by his contemporaries,³⁴ yet he is far less egalitarian than Spenser.

The Protestant who most nearly resembles the poet of The Faerie Queene is not Calvin but Luther. In his Lectures on Genesis, the German reformer—who sometimes addressed his wife as “Midon”—argues that “if the woman [Eve] had not been deceived by the serpent and had not sinned, she would have been the equal of Adam in all respects. For the punishment, that she is now subjected to the man, was imposed on her after sin and because of sin, just as the other hardships and dangers were: travail, pain, and countless other vexations. Therefore Eve was not like the woman of today; her state was far better and more excellent, and she was in no respect inferior to Adam, whether you count the qualities of the body or those of the mind.”³⁵ As in Spenser's Isis Church episode, Luther characterizes relations between the genders in astral terms, emphasizing equality in the bearers of the divine image but observing that the genders differ in their potential for glory. He writes, “Although Eve was a most extraordinary creature—similar to Adam so far as the image of God is concerned, that is, in justice [iusticiam], wisdom [sapientiam], and happiness—she was nevertheless a woman. For as the sun is more excellent than the moon, … so the woman, although she was a most beautiful work of God, nevertheless was not the equal of the male in glory and prestige.”³⁶ Like Spenser, Luther also draws a sharp distinction between Eve and women of the present day, and he attributes to her two primary virtues of a ruler: wisdom and justice. Yet even Luther does not go so far as Spenser in defending the sex, for he neither idealizes the descendants of Eve in antiquity nor calls for contemporary women to “awaken” and emulate their achievements. For the German reformer, Eve is different from all her descendents, whose subjection is not to be softened until the Second Coming.³⁷

So unusual, then, is Spenser's view of women that it renders the label “Anglican” or “Calvinist”—or even the broader term “Protestant”—quite misleading. The poet's suggestion that even in this life women can “awake” and recover the virtues and glories that they enjoyed in a long-lost Golden Age runs counter not just to the views of men like Calvin and Aylmer, but also to those of the great majority of churchmen in the period. The distinction turns out to be vital in understanding the succession of idealized goddesses and sanctified women in Book V of The Faerie Queene.

V

As I have suggested elsewhere, Book V is designed around a sequence of stages by which the Golden Age may be recovered in this world.³⁸ With these stages will come renewed achievements for women in the public sphere, of which Book V offers primary models in the persons of Astraea, Isis, Britomart, and Mercilla as well as the English Queen to whom they all have allegorical connections. By linking these figures in a sustained narrative of return, Spenser offers an illustration of the renewal promised in the more discursive and theoretical passages that we have so far been considering.

Early in Book V, Spenser reiterates a central aim of his poem: to “fashion a gentleman or noble person” by returning to representations of “vertuous and noble discipline” in the works of the ancient poets Homer and Vergil (and their later Italian imitators).³⁹ As the Proem of Book V suggests, such a return to “antique use” is necessary because the present age is “corrupted sore” (V. proem 3). To achieve discipline in virtue, then, a “noble person”—whether male or female—must look to models in legendary antiquity, when the genders still retained much of the virtue of their first creation. The attempt to shape the future by recovering the past informs the very structure of Book V.

In the Proem to the Legend of Justice, Spenser begins by recalling the dawn of time:

So oft as I with state of present time,
          The image of the antique world compare,
          When as mans age was in his freshest prime,
          And the first blossome of faire vertue bare,
          Such oddes I finde twixt those, and these which are,
          As that, through long continuance of his course,
          Me seemes the world is runne quite out of square,
          From the first point of his appointed sourse,
And being once amisse growes daily wourse and wourse.
For from the golden age, that first was named,
          It's now at earst become a stonie one

(V.proem.1. 2)

The “first point” from which all has run out of square is the moment of creation, and the passage echoes the opening chapters of Genesis by associating “mans age … in his freshest prime” with the resonant term “image” and the phrase “first blossome of faire vertue.” With typical syncretism, however, Spenser then blurs the distinction between Eden and the “golden age” of Greco-Roman myth. To stress the magnitude of the Fall from the first age to the current “stonie” one, he laments the changes in the heavens and on earth wrought by Mars and Saturn, the astral bodies that have gone most “amisse” (V.2-8). Although he foresees the world's “last ruinous decay,” he holds out hope for a return to ancient heroism in the midst of its “dissolution” (4-6). This hope takes shape in the last three stanzas, which first recall the reign of Saturn and the Golden Age (9) and then offer an image of Edenic order in which humankind once again rules in the image of God (10-11).

As at the beginning of the Proem, allusions to Genesis recur at the end, but with more striking effect, for the one who exemplifies rule in the image of God is not a son of Adam but a daughter of Eve. Depicted as an image of the divine, Queen Elizabeth serves as an embodiment of justice itself, “Most sacred vertue she of all the rest, / Resembling God in his imperiall might” (10, my emphasis). The scriptural allusion in the phrase “Resembling God” is reinforced in the succeeding stanza, where the Queen is represented as a “Goddesse” ruling from the very throne of God:

          That powre he also doth to Princes lend,
          And makes them like himselfe in glorious sight,
          To sit in his owne seate, his cause to end,
And rule his people right, as he doth recommend.
Dread Souerayne Goddesse, that doest highest sit
          In seate of iudgement, in th'Almighties stead,
          And with magnificke might and wondrous wit
          Doest to thy people righteous doome aread,
          That furthest Nations filles with awfull dread,
          Pardon the boldnesse of thy basest thrall,
          That dare discourse of so diuine a read,
          As thy great iustice praysed ouer all

(proem.10-11, my italics).

In asserting Elizabeth's divine right to rule, these lines identify qualities in her and in other rulers that few sixteenth-century Protestants are willing to predicate of the divine “image.” As I have pointed out, to avoid attributing ruling virtues such as iustitia to women, Calvin and other commentators sought to limit the “image” to a few gender-neutral attributes such as “righteousness and true holiness.” Not only does Spenser greatly expand the list, but he picks precisely the qualities that such churchmen were least willing to accept: “glorious sight” (in two senses), elevated status, “wondrous wit,” “magnificke might,” “righteous doom,” “awefull dread” extended to “furthest Nations,” and the “diuine” virtue of justice itself. Since only men were thought capable of such perfections, adding them to the list of attributes included in the divine image and so shared by women was a bold departure from contemporary thought in the Reformed tradition.

One might argue that Spenser regarded these ruling capacities as inherent in Elizabeth by special grace rather than by the general nature of her sex, but to do so would be to miss a crucial detail. In explaining Elizabeth's ability to administer justice, Spenser makes no distinction between her and other princes, male or female. He simply says, “That powre he also doth to Princes lend, / And makes them like himselfe.” Apparently the origin of the Queen's ruling abilities lies in her “making” and not in any special act by which the heavens have “lifted” her to sovereignty. Like all other princes, she shares God's ability to rule because God created her in his image. To be sure, the phrase “makes them like himselfe” might also be thought to cover an act of extraordinary grace by which a woman is given capacities beyond those of her sex. I suspect, however, that even if Protestants of the period had read the statement in that light, they would still have felt uneasy with Spenser's phrasing and with his glorification of Elizabeth as an ideal image of divine justice. Since most in the Reformed camp thought men able to rule by their very nature and women only by God's grace, they would have noticed more readily than we that the poet is eliding a fundamental distinction.

VI

As a whole, the Legend of Justice follows a pattern similar to that of its Proem. It begins with references to the decline from the Golden Age to the Age of Iron (V.1.1, 11), when according to Ovid's Metamorphoses, Astraea, the goddess of Justice, was so repelled by the lust, treachery, and violence of men that she departed from the earth.⁴⁰ Succeeding cantos then reverse the process, depicting the restoration of justice through the efforts of a series of idealized female figures, the last of which is again a queen ruling in the restored image of God. Although Spenser only occasionally appropriates specific details from accounts of the “Ages of Man” by such authorities as Hesiod, Vergil, and Ovid, he marks the stages in his imagined return to a more orderly world using their traditional imagery of iron, silver, and gold.

The first of the idealized female figures of justice is Astraea. We learn the sort of justice that she represents from the training that she gives her pupil Artegall prior to her departure. That he is not, at least initially, a figure of the highest form of justice is clear from his guise as the “salvage knight” and from the nature of his crude servant Talus, who is “made of yron mould” and bears an “yron flale” (12). Artegall is a man of the uncivilized Iron Age, whose early adventures all take place in trackless forests or on wild cliffs and lonely toll-bridges. His confrontations with the likes of Sanglier, Munera, Pollente, and the democratic Giant show the characteristics of the age: brute force exercised in the service of treacherous cunning and untempered desire. The punishments meted out by Artegall are proportionately grisly, involving in each case severed heads or limbs. As the Proem has prepared us to see, the advanced state of disorder in the heavens, notably among the beasts of the zodiac—the Ram, the Bull, the Crab, and the Nemaean Lion (5-7)—is matched on earth by bestial desire and its consequent violence.

It is appropriate, then, that Astraea's instruction of Artegall begins with practice “Vpon wyld beasts” (7). In taming them, he recovers not only the lost authority of Adam and Eve over the “beasts of the field” but also the heroism of such early world-tamers as Hercules and Bacchus, with whom he is compared at the opening of Canto i. In this, the hero also resembles Christ, who in the Gospel of Mark begins his ministry in the wilderness “with the wilde beasts” (1.13). Artegall's judgments in Cantos i-iv illustrate the first of the traditional “parts” of justice that Astraea has taught him, namely strict distribution and retribution according to an abstract and unbending code that weighs “right and wrong / In equall ballance with due recompence” (i.7). In Cantos v-vii, the knight will progress to something more humane, namely “that part of Iustice, which is Equity” (vii.3). Also called “clemency,” equity returns to the principles of justice on which the written law is based in order to consider extenuating circumstances that a general or imperfect code may not take into account. Thus Spenser says that it “measure[s] out along, / According to the line of conscience, / When so it needs with rigour to dispence” (i.7).⁴¹ After society has been tamed by the application of a strict code of law, the next step in the recovery of the Golden Age is the institution of a more philosophically refined notion of equity. This Spenser introduces in another pair of idealized female figures, Britomart and the goddess Isis.

With their appearance in Cantos vi-vii, Iron-Age justice gives way to that of the Age of Silver. Accordingly, the scene shifts from wild settings to more civilized ones, and in particular to a city and a pagan temple, where the statue of the ruling deity is “framed all of siluer fine” and wears a garment “Hemd all about with fringe of siluer twine” (vii.6). In her dream at Isis Church, Britomart appears in a highly civilized role, that of a queen arrayed in “robe of scarlet.” By contrast, her future husband retains his earlier roughness and brutality, appearing as a crocodile that must be subdued by the silver rod of Isis. Since the goddess is identified with equity (3), the allegory suggests that Artegall's “part” of justice is to be tempered by another, the clemency of his future wife.

In the first eight cantos of Book V, then, Spenser traces two steps in an allegorical return from the Iron Age to that of Gold. The first curbs lawlessness and the second refines and civilizes the treatment of offenders. A third and final step is exemplified in Canto ix in the person of Mercilla, who is depicted ruling from a “throne of gold full bright and sheene” (ix.27). From the wild regions tamed by Artegall and the city and temple dominated by Britomart we proceed to the heart of civil government, the royal court. Although Mercilla knows and practices both the “parts” of classical justice depicted in earlier episodes, she is primarily an embodiment of a higher virtue, Christian mercy.⁴² Like equity, mercy protects the accused but does so by freely forgiving those who repent rather than by simply “measuring out” more equitable punishments. Seated in the divine judgment seat and arrayed in resplendent attire that seems to be cloth of gold but is actually sunlight, the figure of Mercilla resembles God in the Book of Revelation, surrounded by the Cloud of Glory.⁴³ Like her maker, she rules in splendor that transcends the natural:

All ouer her a cloth of state was spred,
          Not of rich tissew, nor of cloth of gold,
          Nor of ought else, that may be richest red,
          But like a cloud, as likest may be told,
          That her brode spreading wings did wyde vnfold;
          Whose skirts were bordred with bright sunny beams,
          Glistring like gold, amongst the plights enrold

(28).

Although Mercilla comes as close as a mortal “image” can to the perfection of the divine, it is important to note that hers is still an earthly court, as the poet stresses by representing her throne “embost with Lyons and with Flourdelice,” the royal arms of England and France (27). Like the image of Queen Elizabeth in the Proem, that of Mercilla embodies the divine in the earthly form of a woman. Once again, there is no distinction drawn between her and male princes in the crucial matter of the means by which she attained her right and ability to rule. In explaining the presence of the Litae at her feet, the poet treats her like any other prince, saying that, as they serve Jove, “They also doe … / Vpon the thrones of mortall Princes tend” (32). To establish Mercilla's right to govern, he simply gives her bloodline, remarking that she was “the heyre of ancient kings / And mightie Conquerors” (29).

Now it might be urged that the narrative and conceptual progression involving the four great female figures of justice in Book V reveals much about Spenser's views of queens but little about his assessment of ordinary women. After all, Astraea and Isis are goddesses, and Britomart and Mercilla may simply be the sort of divinely chosen exceptions acknowledged by Calvin and other opponents of women's rule. Yet to deny that such figures are representative of their sex is to overlook the fact that all four are linked allegorically with a particular woman, Queen Elizabeth, and her capacity to govern is repeatedly presented as deriving from her creation in the “image” of God. For Spenser to glorify a female ruler of his own day using imagery drawn from the divine throne of judgment in the Book of Revelation was already to challenge the teachings of Calvin and the Reformed Church. For him to celebrate that ruler as a harbinger of a return to a lost Golden Age was to exceed even the most liberal expectations of Aylmer and Luther.

If Spenser's views about women's rule are as I have sketched them, then the problem with which we began allows a rather straightforward solution. Having written the passages in Book III that invoke the memory of the Golden Age and rouse women to reclaim their former glory, the poet may well have written the opposing passage in Book V to urge restraint until the time is right. Since he thinks women of his day ill prepared to reclaim their sex's ancient role in public affairs, and since he regards their “awakening” as a work that only the heavens can bring about, his reminders about the need for obedience and lawful succession are understandable. Although he supports dramatic changes in the roles of the genders, he is concerned that they come about peacefully through the grace of God and not by violent acts of usurpation and vengeance of the sort undertaken by Radigund. The continued subservience advocated in Book V is not to be dismissed, as some have suggested, but neither is it to be regarded as Spenser's final vision of women's earthly estate. It is just the starting point on the long road back to Eden.

Notes

1. I am grateful to Pamela Joseph Benson, Carol Kaske, and William Kennedy for reading drafts of this essay and offering many wise and helpful suggestions.

2. The Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton (London, 1977).

3. “Spenser and the Problem of Women's Rule,” Huntington Library Quarterly 48 (1985), 141-58.

4. “Radigund Revisited: Perspectives on Women Rulers in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania,” in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst, 1990), pp. 187-207.

5. Aylmer, An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Svbiectes agaynst the late blowne Blaste, concerninge the Gouernment of Wemen. … 2d issue (Strasbourg, 1559), sig. D2v.

6. James E. Phillips, Jr., “The Background of Spenser's Attitude Toward Women Rulers,” Huntington Library Quarterly 5 (1941), 5-32; “The Woman Ruler in Spenser's Faerie Queene,” Huntington Library Quarterly 5 (1941), 211-34. Pamela Benson, “Rule, Virginia: Protestant Theories of Female Regiment in The Faerie Queene,” in The Invention of the Renaissance Woman (University Park, Penn., 1992), pp. 251-303. Benson generally agrees with Phillips, although she is also careful to note elements of Anglican and humanist thought in Spenser's synthesis.

7. Letter from Calvin to Sir William Cecil, dated from Geneva sometime after January 29, 1559 (new style). Letter XV in The Zurich Letters, 2d ser., tr. Hastings Robinson (Cambridge, Eng., 1845), pp. 34-35.

8. Roberts, p. 192.

9. Margaret Olofson Thickston also sees Spenser's hope for “great exploits” as limited to women of royal blood. See Fictions of the Feminine: Puritan Doctrine and the Representation of Women (Ithaca, 1988), pp. 37-59. Mary R. Bowman argues that Britomart (and her counterpart, Queen Elizabeth) gain power in a patriarchal culture by eliminating other, even more threatening female figures (such as the Amazons) and then adopting “the guise of a more convential female role.” See “‘She there as Princess rained’: Spenser's Figure of Elizabeth,” Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990), 509-28.

10. See Thompson, John Calvin and the Daughters of Sarah: Women in Regular and Exceptional Roles in the Exegesis of Calvin, His Predecessors, and His Contemporaries (Geneva, 1992), and Douglass, Women, Freedom, and Calvin: The 1983 Annie Kinkead Warfield Lectures (Philadelphia, 1985).

11. All quotations from Scripture are from The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison, 1969).

12. See Thompson, pp. 107-28, 187-226.

13. Thompson, pp. 87-105.

14. Thompson, pp. 136-38.

15. Thompson, pp. 95-105.

16. According to Luther, among the redeemed “The penalty remains, though the guilt has passed away.” See Commentary on 1 Tim. 2:15, in Luther's Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann, 55 vols. (St. Louis, 1955-1986), XXVIII, 279. For similar views among other Protestants, see Thompson, pp. 145-57.

17. On Chrysostom's influence in Renaissance Europe and means by which his thought might have reached Spenser, see Harold Weatherby, Mirrors of Celestial Grace: Patristic Theology in Spenser's Allegory (Toronto, 1994), pp. 4-11.

18. Homilies on Genesis 10.4 and 17.8, in The Fathers of the Church, LXXIV (Washington, 1986), pp. 134, 240-41.

19. See Thompson, pp. 87-105, 134-59. Prelapsarian equality is, for example, discussed and rejected in the commentaries of Calvin, Bucer, and Zwingli and of younger reformers such as Peter Martyr and Henry Bullinger, who were particularly influential in England.

20. Aylmer, sig. C4. See also sigs. D1 and I1-13.

21. Sigs. I2v-I3, C3v.

22. Ancient women did not take the garland in battle “still,” or continually, but the poet's gross exaggeration does not suggest facetiousness so much as impudence. Both here and at III.iv.2, his disregard for the very historical “record” that he cites seems designed to make the best and most charming defense a bold offense.

23. Spenser's position bears a superficial resemblance to that of Aylmer's archenemy, John Knox. Disparaging contemporary queens such as Mary Tudor and Mary Queen of Scots as modern-day “Amazons,” Knox stresses the “cruelty” of women and the unnaturalness of their rule, but also concedes that it sometimes has divine sanction. See The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. 1558, ed. Edward Arber (London, 1878), pp. 4, 11-14. Spenser's views differ in several crucial respects. He sees Nature itself as in need of renewal, laws against women's rule as the effects of male envy, and “cruelty” not as a vice of women in general but only of those who rebel. A review of all his uses of the term “cruel” and its cognates reveals no special association with women and, if anything, a tendency to depict them as more merciful than men.

24. Sig. G2v. In Aylmer's paraphrase of Gen. 3.16, God tells Eve, “yet shalt thou not be hable to withdrawe the[e] from thy husband, but shalt gyue occasion to haue more [children].”

25. Sig. G3.

26. Letter XV in The Zurich Letters, pp. 34-35.

27. Letter-Book of Gabriel Harvey, A. D. 1573-1580, ed. Edward J.L. Scott (Westminster, 1884), p. 86.

28. Ioannis Calvini Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia, ed. G. Baum, E. Cunitz, and E. Reuss, 59 vols. (Brunswick and Berlin, 1863-1900), LIII, 221-22; English trans., LIII, 225.

29. On the importance of this distinction for Spenser, see A. S. P. Woodhouse, “Nature and Grace in The Faerie Queene,” ELH, 16 (1949), 194-228, and Robert Hoopes, “‘God Guide Thee, Guyon’: Nature and Grace Reconciled in The Faerie Queene Book II,” Review of English Studies, n.s. 5 (1954), 14-24.

30. Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis, tr. John King (Edinburgh, 1847; rpt. Grand Rapids, 1984), I, 94-96; Calvin: Institutes, ed. John T. McNeill, tr. Ford Lewis Battles, Library of the Christian Classics, 20-21 (Philadelphia, 1960), I, 15.4.

31. Comm. Gen., pp. 130-31, 146-53, and 164.

32. Comm. Gen., p. 172.

33. See Serm. 1 Cor. 11:4-10, 11-16, and Serm. Eph. 6:5-9, in Ioannis Calvini Opera, XLIX.722-23, 741-42; LI, 802-03. See also Comm. Gen., pp. 176-77. For the position of other Protestant commentators, see Thompson, pp. 152-57.

34. In Douglass see, e.g., pp. 46-51.

35. Luther's Works, I, 115; Luthers Werke, XLII, 87.

36. Luther's Works, I, 69; Luthers Werke, XLII, 51-52.

37. See Luther's Works, XXVIII, 279.

38. “Isis Versus Mercilla: The Allegorical Shrines in Spenser's Legend of Justice,” Spenser Studies, 3 (1982), 87-98.

39. See the Letter to Ralegh, in Hamilton's edition, Appendix I, p. 737.

40. For Ovid's account of the ages, see Metamorphoses, I.89-312.

41. For a review of secondary literature on the origins and precise formulations of Spenser's concepts of justice, equity, and mercy in Book V, see my article “Isis Versus Mercilla.”

42. Just as her punishment of Malefont reminds us of the harshness of Talus, so her judgment and execution of Duessa calls to mind Britomart's treatment of Radigund. The last two malefactors are both linked allegorically with Mary, Queen of Scots, who was tried by an English commission acting as a court of equity.

43. Rev. 4.2-11. Since Spenser's exemplars of justice all participate to some extent in one another's special virtues, his use of symbols overlaps. Although the metals associated with Britomart and Artegall are predominantly silver and iron, he bears a “steely” sword “garnisht all with gold” (i.9-10) and she a “Moon-like mitre” that, in her dream, turns to a crown of gold (vii.13). Similarly, the hem of Mercilla's skirt, at which suppliants traditionally seek clemency, “shoot[s] forth siluer streames” (ix.28).