There is also Ralegh's poem, "Give me my scallop shell of quiet," whose
speaker proposes to don a palmer's garb.
My difficulty with Spenser's Palmer is not Protestant-Catholic, since we
have the House of Holiness in a Protestant epic also. But to me Guyon's
Palmer seems to personify something like Aristotelian phronesis, in the
kind of advice he gives Guyon and the horizon he seems himself to have as
he reacts to events and moves through the "world" of Book II. Despite lots
of other takes on Book II and the Palmer, I still buy Woodhouse's reading,
whereby Guyon is missing the whole dimension of experience and allegiance
to which a religious Palmer would represent access.
Jane Hedley
At 09:47 AM 2/11/02 -0600, you wrote:
>This isn't much better than idle curiosity, but I've been worrying about
>the Palmer of late: what is he doing in a Protestant epic? There's been
>lots written about what he represents, but nothing (that I have found over
>the weekend) on the more blockheaded question of why Spenser makes him a
>pilgrim returned from the Holy Land. Romeo talks about palmers, of course.
>Are they still common in Reformation England c. 1590? Or are Spenser and
>Shakespeare remembering something that had gone the way of the mass?
>
>-----------------------------------------------------------------------
>David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org [log in to unmask]
>Macalester College Virgil Tradition: discussion, bibliography, &c.
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