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

and half-serpent Echidna. The ba le between Arthur and Geryoneo’s
monster cues memories of Redcrosse’s much earlier fight with the mon-
ster Errour, back in Book 1, yet Arthur’s ba le ends not with the death
of a monstrous woman-serpent who spews monstrous serpent-children
from a vile mouth (1. 1. 26. 2). Instead, with a death-dealing stroke to
Geryoneo’s monster’s “wombe,” Arthur makes “for her entrails […] an
open way,” so that the gush of “vgly filth, and poison” nearly chokes
him. Despite the different actions of the knights, both encounter a
“deadly stinke” (5. 11. 31, 1. 1. 22. 2) during a struggle that finally ends
well for them. The emotional and visceral intensity of the two episodes
forms a bond manifest in cues and actions — bases for a memorial net-
work that draws together Books 1 and 5, appearing first in 1590 and
1596 respectively, despite the differing knights and their distinct imme-
diate and long-term quests. The entire complex of such networked as-
sociations grows with a reader’s progress through the Faerie Queene. All
its repetitions and recursive moments — with their potential for multi-
ple affordances and interpretations — contribute to an increasing num-
ber of networked memorial experiences that appear, reappear, and shift
in significance as a reader encounters subsequent episodes. 29
Given the evidence of cognitive research, episodes in the Faerie
Queene that encourage readers’ focalization of characters in emotion-
ally intense situations ought to evoke exceptionally strong, long-term
memories, ones that are capable of bridging across many cantos and

29 Spenser’s readers could have conceptualized textual memory by means of
early modern psychology and Philip Sidney’s theory of poetics. In Sidney’s
Defence of Poesie (Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry and Astrophil and Stella:
Texts and Contexts, ed. Peter Herman, [Glen Allen, VA: College Publishing,
2011]), poetry is said to have a unique capacity to affect the “imaginative and
judging power” by providing “perfect” pictures of rarely-seen creatures (such
as rhinoceroses) or the “true lively knowledge” of a “gorgeous palace,” which
surpasses the architect’s description (74). In contrast to the la er’s “wordish
description” the poet writes to “strike, pierce” and “possess the sight of the
soul” through the energeia or “forcibleness” of stories (74, 119). Sidney in-
cludes among examples of narratives the parables of the Gospels, which, he
claims, surpass “moral commonplaces” in that they “more constantly, as it
were, inhabit both the memory and judgment” (77, my emphasis).

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