Very interesting discussion, branching in ways that
would bewilder the Palmer and probably trouble Guyon. I
can't say whether he would gasp and swoon or take rash
action. But why, David, do you say that Spenser wanted
to eliminate any fictions? If fictions are freedoms, I
suppose he was ill at ease with some, but I think he was
ill at ease with actions too, and that contributed
indirectly to his energies as a poet.
The Palmer's involvement in the Mammon episode isn't
utterly nil; that sojourn gives him time to catch up
with his errant pupil and contribute a little to his
rescue by Arthur. And while Guyon sleeps, perchance to
dream of the Cupid-like angel who guards him, the Palmer
sees the angel, finds him lovely, and is left with his
own limitations when the angel vanishes.
Why a Palmer, not a schoolmaster or don or some other
exponent of humanistic learning, to play the mentoring
role? Maybe palmers in Spenser's day were valued mostly
for their credentials as 'savvy travelers,' like Rudy
Maxa in our time.
Cheers, Jon Quitslund
> I sort of like David W-O's question. To say we don't worry about it
> because there's also the House of Holiness in a Protestant epic (or a Friar
> in Romeo and Juliet, or a St. George in a Protestant epic, etc.) is not so
> much to answer the question as to expand it. Why is the literature of the
> English Reformation, at least in the sixteenth century if not in the
> seventeenth, so open to a specifically Christian syncretism in its
> fictions? Why does same poet who (we think) supported the Leicester
> faction on foreign policy allow his imagination to be so permeable to just
> those fictions he wanted to exclude from ecclesiastical polity?
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