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

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books. Textual memories linked to cues such as wands and rods con-
vey a degree of emotional valence centered in their connections to vi-
sionary and empowered experience; those linked to the Faerie Queene’s
temples have more enduring salience due to the associated affects of
surprise, negatively-valenced fear, sexual danger and/or desire. En-
duringly memorable also are episodes that feature physical unmask-
ing and recognition. 31
A protocol of aesthetic emotions compiled by Ines Schindler and
others identifies surprise as an epistemic or knowledge-related emo-
tion, similar to inspiration, desire for insight or understanding, and
curiosity. Although the feeling of surprise is usually short-lived, it in-
tensifies other emotions ranging from “interest and amusement” to
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“confusion and irritation.” In the Faerie Queene, a network of intra-
textual memories representing surprise appears in connection to sud-
den recognitions of identity and episodes featuring single combat. One
that joins a surprising revelation to the unhelmeting of a defeated
knight is introduced first in Book 1, when the evil rapist Sans loy is
surprised to discover that the knight he has fought and unmasks is
not his enemy, the knight Redcrosse, but an old magician and friend,
Archimago, dressed in arms like Redcrosse’s (1. 3. 37. 1). Here, sur-
prise amplifies Sans loy’s regret at having assaulted his aged friend,

30 On Gérard Gene e’s “focalization” and its narratological use to describe
“the submission of (potentially limitless) narrative information to a perspec-
tival filter,” see Manfred Jahn’s chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Narra-
tive (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 94-108, and Uri Mar-
golin, “Cognitive Science, the Thinking Mind, and Literary Narrative,” in
Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, ed. David Herman (Stanford: CSLI
Publications, 2003), 271-94. See also Caracciolo, The Experientality of Narrative:
An Enactivist Approach, 167-68.
31 On recognition and the function of image schemata in Sidney’s Old and
New Arcadias — operating much like Spenser’s schemata, see Hillary P. Dan-
nenberg, Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plo ing Time and Space in Narrative
Fiction (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 77-79.
32 Ines Schindler et al., “Measuring Aesthetic Emotions: A Review of Litera-
ture and a New Assessment Tool,” PLOS One 12, no. 6 (2017): 7, 18, doi:
10.1371/journal/_pone_0178899.

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