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DANIEL T. LOCHMAN, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

The textual artifact allows for the enactive sharing of textual memories
with other readers and the emergence of both individual and shared
memories distributed across intertextual narratives. Holding in mind
one episode or many different texts, readers have the capacity to ex-
trapolate from the present and forecast anticipated actions, share a
reading experience with others, and uncover authorial, autobiograph-
ical, or cultural memories that are afforded by complex narratives.
Through the narrative repetition, description, and recursivity
woven throughout The Faerie Queene (both the 1590 and 1596 editions),
Spenser compensated for destabilizing narrative forces by developing
repetitive sub-structures capable of bridging across and within books
and cantos, substructures that offered more or less similar reading ex-
periences and that added richness, density, and coherence even to the
1596 narrative, which ends not with the satisfaction of dynastic mar-
riage in praise of the House of Este, but with the biting and barking of
the Bla ant Beast, a canine creature tamed for a time by the heroic
Calidore but on the loose again at the close of Book 6, able once more
to deride all “in each degree and state” (6. 12. 40. 1-2). Bellamy and
Gregerson show us the rich interpretive yield that results from analy-
sis of formal narrative pa erns, but here I will consider another ap-
proach, one that looks to the narrative repetition and recursiveness ex-
emplified in The Faerie Queene. They are means of achieving a coher-
ence that emerges through the experience of the narrative and of mem-
ories — the memories of characters within the narrative, to be sure,
but more especially of readers searching for coherence in this long,
complex work. 12

12 See Daniel C. Boughner’s “The Psychology of Memory in Spenser’s Faerie
Queene,” PMLA 47, no. 1 (March 1932): 89-96, with its focus on the theme of
memory in relation to sixteenth-century medicine and culture, and Frances
Yates’ classic Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). Since
Yates’s work, there has been renewed interest in the rhetorical/locational, his-
torical, and cultural expressions of memory and its art within Spenser’s work.
See Alana D. Shilling, “The Worth of Imperfect Memory: Allusion and Fictions
of Continuity in Petrarch and Spenser,” PMLA 125, no. 5 (December 2010):
1075-97; Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Phys-
iology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge,

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