Abstract

This study is meant to establish more fully the presence of Epicurean materials in Spenser and in the forms of Renaissance culture that Spenser reflects and helps to shape. It concentrates on Book 2 of The Faerie Queene, since this book contains many of Spenser's most important exchanges with Epicureanism, but it also considers other passages in that work and throughout the Spenserian canon. The first chapter takes the figure of Grille as Spenser's retrospective signal of Epicureanism's importance to Book 2: it examines Spenser's sources--which include auctores sympathetic to Epicurus, such as Lucretius and Diogenes Laertius, and those critical of the philosophy of the Garden, such as Cicero and Plutarch--and his presentation of materials from these sources. Throughout these representations, Spenser signals his awareness that there were different Epicurean traditions available in the sixteenth century, each with its own degree of acceptance or rejection of Epicureanism, and its own degree of accuracy in its understanding of the philosophy. The second chapter deals with the Proem to Book 2 and the parallel passages which describe Amavia's death and Guyon's faint. In these, Spenser is able both to identify actual Epicurean teachings and to withhold full acceptance of them. The chapter deals primarily with those aspects of Epicureanism, especially its teachings about providence and piety, which are least compatible with Spenser's project of instruction in Christian and civic virtue. The third chapter centers on the Cave of Mammon. In the Cave, Spenser considers the conflation of the Epicure with the Machiavel and the genuine challenge which Epicureanism presented to the "Machiavellian" principles that were at work in Renaissance culture. Spenser pits two versions of Epicureanism against each other, in order to indict the excesses at work in his own society. The fourth chapter examines Spenser's extension of the Epicurean critique of political culture, which he applies to the relation between power and poetry, and also to the social effects of the Epicurean retreat from the polis. Finally, in the Bower of Bliss episode, Spenser employs Epicureanism to critique his own enterprise in "imitating" Virgilian civic verse