Britton, Dennis. "Race in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/race-in-spensers-the-faerie-queene. [Date accessed].
Race in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene
How allegory becomes a tool of racialization in The Faerie Queene.
Those who insist on reading Spenser's The Faerie Queene as only an anti-Catholic allegory are missing a crucial truth: the epic genre had already made Muslims apt figures for his allegory, and his allegory only helps further racialize Muslims. Race and allegory work similarly—they both require that bodies become abstractions, and that bodies and their features become signifiers of virtues or vices. While the genre of epic has significantly defined what Muslims are in the white European imagination, Spenser’s allegory actually helps make racist tropes “stick” to Muslim bodies.
Further learning
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Spenser and his racializing influences
Comparing episodes from The Faerie Queene with episodes from the works that inspired Spenser, in particular excerpts from Ariosto’s and Tasso’s works, is a productive way to draw attention to how racialization travels and mutates across national traditions.
Recommended
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La Chanson de Roland and white supremacist medievalisms
La Chanson de Roland as a national epic was a product of both European nationalist and colonial aspirations. It's important for students to understand how the poem and its histories can reiterate Eurocentric white supremacist values if not properly contextualized.
"Merciless Beauty" and carceral justice
“Merciless Beauty” is a poem written in a late 14th-century English that may or may not be Chaucer’s but is highly comparable to Chaucer’s usage. Reading the poem alongside the film The Prison in 12 Landscapes, students are asked to make connections between the poem and the film and their formal examinations of time, incarceration, and repetition.
