Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
When Edmund Spenser (1552?–99) published his Faerie Queene in 1590 and 1596, two pervasive structural features would have seemed surprising: the abbreviation Cant. in sectional and running titles, used instead of Canto; and a four-line stanza of common meter for each section's argument, instead of a more expansive and prestigious stanza. Study of the relevant early modern Italian and English norms of publication indicates that these were complementary and innovative means of merging heroic form with divine poetry and hymnic discourse, and recognized as such. Cant. readily suggested canticle and the Solomonic Canticles, and the poet himself calls one of his so-called cantos a “canticle” (4.5.46). In style and prosodic form, his arguments would have particularly evoked the nationally distinctive Elizabethan Protestant psalmody and hymnody, as well as popular ballads. By incorporating these two metamorphic devices into The Faerie Queene's framework, Spenser reconfigured the heroic poem to serve his different, English vision.
This study originated from Kenneth Borris's paper “Spenser's Canticles of Faery,” given at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in 1999. Its redevelopment here was undertaken as a project within a research program enabled by a Standard Research Grant that he received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and so we the authors thank the Council for its support. We also thank our two anonymous evaluators for their learned and insightful responses, and the various research libraries that accommodated our inquiries and supplied our illustrations.