The castle, a building with specific importance in military and architectural history, also frequently appears in literary works like The Faerie Queene as an allegorical or symbolic image. Studies of The Faerie Queene have tended to disregard, or indeed to deny, the influence of specific military practices on the poem. Alastair Fowler argues that Spenser is less interested in physical combat than a different type of heroism, ‘a spiritual struggle’, and that he ‘seldom poeticises detailed particulars of modern war to the extent that Milton does’. Michael West's analysis proves the influence of some of these particulars, but suggests that the incomplete extent to which they are absorbed into the poem creates a ‘slightly absurd’ effect. And in his broader study, Michael Murrin sees Spenser as the epitome of a tradition of English writers of ‘peaceful epic’, who turned their attention away from war on account of their lack of military experience, and their interest in other themes.

Changes in European warfare during the sixteenth century had brought about rapid and profound changes in the ways that military architecture was designed and built.