Page 175 - Costellazioni 5

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

tive valences and contribute to the salience of memories generated by
and across texts, and they provide for an engaged reader vicarious ex-
periences that form the noetic, emotional, and kinetic bases of net-
worked memories that accumulate within and across texts. Due to the
complex design and sheer length of The Faerie Queene, schemata related
to single words and scripts of repeated textual experience produce
memories illustrated by the connected networks of surprising recogni-
tions and near-slayings, but these are just two of a vast meta-network
comprehending the range of possible narratives generated in this work
and its formation of a fictive storyworld. As, I would suggest, in other
complex narratives, a satisfaction results from reading such narratives.
Because of its many complex structural techniques and its lack of an
overarching resolution, The Faerie Queene generates textual memories
whose overlapping networked experiences play an exceptionally pow-
erful role as a means of establishing coherence across far-flung cantos
and books. Many, whether early modern, ancient, or postmodern, re-
quire a similarly enactive formation of textual memory, with opportu-
nities for remembering (and for forge ing) previous experiences that
gesture toward an individual’s “continuity of life and mind.” Experi-
ential memories may be shared and embedded not only within a text
or within many texts but also within the “deep continuity of life and
mind” of individuals and their culture — a culture like the one collec-
tively shaped by the sovereignty of Elizabeth, who, as Spenser implied
in the Le er to Raleigh, has Britomart as one of many avatars. Like Eliz-
abeth, Britomart is a woman and a warrior, Elizabeth being the sover-
eign leader of a nation at war against Spain in 1588 but also a private
woman who cultivated relationships with men like Robert Dudley and
Walter Raleigh.
Beyond the culture within Elizabethan England, Bradamante’s rev-
elation in Orlando Furioso and Clorinda’s in Gerusalemme Liberata, like the
several of Britomart in the Faerie Queene, form an intertextual reading ex-
perience whose noetic and affective power extends beyond the immediate
national interests and links to networks of textual memories that combine
and coalesce in representations of warrior women across nation-states.
Readings of powerful noetic and emotional texts can, we know, be stored
in and reinstantiated by long-term memory; and fiction can inspire net-
worked sequences of recurrent experiences like those we have seen con-

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