Abstract
This introduction engages Spenser’s earliest publication, A Theatre for Worldlings (1569), to open up the concerns of Edmund Spenser and Animal Life. It locates Spenser’s writings within discussions of animals and literary form as they are ethically and politically inflected. We make the case that animals have a quality of simultaneity that suspends the need to choose between seeing them as ‘mere’ abstractions or ‘real’ creatures. The introduction then goes on to give an overview of how scholarship on Spenser is in dialogue with the bigger picture of early modern Animal Studies. The final section summarises the chapters that follow.
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Notes
- 1.
The epigrams are from Petrarch’s Rime Sparse (c.1327–1368), as translated from Italian into French by Clément Marot. The first eleven sonnets are from Joachim du Bellay’s Songe (1558); the remaining four were probably composed by Van der Noot (Spenser 1999, 508). See MacFaul (2010) for detail on the translation and a discussion which positions the poems within Van der Noot’s book as a whole. Cf. Hadfield (2012), 38–47.
- 2.
The phoenix was an Elizabethan and Jacobean image of royal succession and successful lineal continuity; for a discussion of this mythical bird’s significance in the period see Kantarowicz (1997, 385–400).
- 3.
... to use two terms paired in tension by Dominic O’Key and Donna Haraway. For the history of ‘creature’ see O’Key (2022, 22–37). ‘Critter’ is Haraway’s alternative to convey the idea of living organisms as opposed to the aesthetically-mediated, Biblically-freighted ‘creature’. See Haraway (2016, passim).
- 4.
As Keenleyside (2016), alongside Tobias Menely (2015), makes clear, the Enlightenment and eighteenth century created particular conditions for animal life and its comprehension by people. This is not solely owing to the major hinge of Descartes’ articulation of the beast-machine thesis in his Discourse on Method (1637). It is also because the concept of sensibility changed how people could think about animal communication, while the emergence of animal rights discourse increased people’s consciousness of their duties to animals (Menely 2015). For a discussion of Descartes turned towards the sixteenth century see Bach (2018).
- 5.
This description resonates with Oerlemans’ argument that complexity and doubleness characterise allegorical representations of animals (2018, 28; see 27–51 for extended discussion of medieval and early modern animal allegory).
- 6.
Barrett herself notes this, but distinguishes between surface reading’s focus on reading strategies, and her own focus on the text’s internal strategies (Barrett 2016, 20).
- 7.
See also Fudge et al. (1999).
- 8.
See also Boehrer (2002) on animal metaphor.
- 9.
See also Box Office Bears, a project about animal baiting in the playing culture of London’s Bankside.
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Stenner, R., Shinn, A. (2024). Introduction: Edmund Spenser and Animal Studies. In: Stenner, R., Shinn, A. (eds) Edmund Spenser and Animal Life . Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42641-4_1
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