Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T16:22:38.300Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Historical contexts: Britain and Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Andrew Hadfield
Affiliation:
University College of Wales, Aberystwyth
Get access

Summary

Events and Personages

Edmund Spenser lived at a time when the charged relation between the two 'contexts' of this chapter, Britain and Europe, was changing drastically, and, as we will see, his own relation to these shifting contexts was often equivocal. Inserting Spenser into historical contexts can be problematic, and, certainly, no amount of 'context' can finally decide the meaning of Spenser's life or work. In the several books of The Faerie Queene and elsewhere, we find an ongoing mediation on historical contexts that is an index both of Spenser's own uncertain placement within them and his indeterminate effect on them. Sometimes this dialectic can be traced quite clearly: not only can Spenser's work be set 'within' these historical contexts, but these contexts themselves are, to an extent, being defined by him as he writes. In the later years of the sixteenth century, for instance, one of our contexts, that of 'Britain', was not yet assembled as an effective political union. Strictly speaking, 'Great Britain' would not come into existence until 1801. But Spenser invested in the imagining of such a polity throughout his career, and some of our conception of 'Britain' as a splendid fusion of disparate nations we owe to him. 'How brutish is it not to vnderstand', cries Arthur in the second book of The Faerie Queene, looking up from a chronicle titled Briton moniments, 'How much to [Britain] we owe, that all vs gaue, / That gaue vnto vs all, what euer good we haue' (II, x, 69). In other places, however, the dialectic between Spenser and his contexts is less easy to discern.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×