Spenser’s Skeptical Artwork
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 April 2021
Spenser’s poetry offers a glimpse into the aesthetics of skepticism. To understand Spenser’s exploration of perception, interpretation, and subjective experience, the chapter considers skeptical questions posed by medieval philosophy regarding universals, abstraction, mental language, the status of pictures in the mind, and the extent of God’s power. According to Heiko Oberman’s view of the via moderna, these nominalist investigations with their counterfactual approach lead to feelings of contingency and autonomy that in turn produce the subversive political idea that things can be otherwise. In his translations of du Bellay and Marot in his Complaints and in “November,” as well as on Mount Acidale in The Fairy Queen and in The Mutability Cantos, Spenser creates rapturous visions that soon dissolve. These intimations of the sublime have a skeptical quality that suggest a grounding in nominalism. Because Heidegger combats a skeptical metaphysics premised on the rift between subject and object, this chapter uses aspects of his philosophical lexicon to illuminate the stakes of Spenser’s poetic travail with problems of truth, concealment, disclosure, and fullness of being.
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.
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.
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.