When the themes of Book I of The Faerie Queene are discussed in isolation from the poem which contains them, they seem particularly unpromising material for an imaginative fiction. Spenser's remarkable achievement is the embodiment of these themes in a finely constructed and psychologically penetrating romance narrative. Through an account of the adventures of two romance persons, whom iconography makes quite recognisable at their first appearance, he communicates a range of moral and spiritual meanings which the reader assimilates from the suggestions implicit in word or image. Interpretations need not be imposed from outside; Spenser is a poet who can be trusted to indicate by his language what moral, spiritual or ecclesiastical ideas are relevant from moment to moment in the narrative. Moreover, the dense accumulation of detail is controlled by a strong design, in which all the episodes concerning the protagonist derive from the initial defects in his own nature. A small amount of necessary romance interlacing is provided by the adventures of Una in Cantos iii and vi.

As in other books of the poem, the eclectic poet made use in Book I of an extraordinary variety of sources and models, although two in particular have central importance for this book – the St George legend and the Revelation of St John. The latter reached Spenser, as Josephine Waters Bennett showed in 1942, profoundly coloured by the interpretations of sixteenth-century Protestant commentators such as Bale, Bullinger, Fulke and van der Noodt. In the present chapter I shall build on that insight of hers, but I shall also make an analogous point about Spenser's other major source, the life of St George.