Coming rather late in the day to this discussion, I didn’t really ponder the striking significance of “vitall blood” in the lines Dot has brought to our attention until I read Jim Nohrnberg’s two posts.  Perhaps this is the opening I’ve been looking for, to invite others into an associative consideration of the semiotics of blood in Spenser’s poem.

It’s a big and fascinating topic, not much examined so far as I know.  Back when I was working hard on FQ, I explored the subject of “spirit” but stopped short of writing about the closely related subject of blood.  Subsequently, coming upon a remarkable suite of jazz compositions, “Blood Sutra,” by the polymathic pianist Vijay Iyer, I found a brief statement by Iyer that pertains accidentally to Spenser’s poem: 

“The word ‘blood’ conjures up a series of symbolically charged associations: health, kinship, identity, race, violence, liquidity, desire.  This music concerns itself with these interrelated concepts.”  

That says almost enough to indicate what blood signifies in Spenser; I would only modify “kinship” to emphasize “lineage,” in line with the comments others have made on Belphoebe in relation to Elizabeth.

A few further comments occur to me.

1. Belphoebe and Amoret can be listed among the poem’s several foundlings, and Amoret is a kind of changeling, taken up by Venus in wayward Cupid’s “stead.”  Much is made of the advantage gained by each infant from her exotic wet-nurse, who serves as a proxy for her divine foster mother.  We know that in the better (and the would-be-better) families in Spenser’s time, giving a child to a wet-nurse was common.  But in Ireland, weren’t the English concerned about contagion (a kind of race-mixing) if a child was given to an Irish wet-nurse?  If so, does this suggest a belief that something of the nurse’s blood (or vital spirit) was taken in with her milk?  The doubly special circumstances of B’s and A’s birth and breeding replace a common source of anxiety with a story – two stories – stretching the envelope of credibility not once but several times.
2. Concerning the poetical antithesis that Jim finds in the blood / brood of Error, doesn’t its coalblack color suggest printer’s ink?  Spenser’s fame as a poet was almost entirely dependent on the printing press and the book trade, and it’s in that light that I understand Error as an allegory of the printing press.
3. We’re all familiar with the instances of blood and bleeding in Amoret’s story, in the Scudamour / Busirane episodes and the mishap that connects her with Timias.  I was about to say that nothing corresponds to that in Belphoebe’s story, but when she is surprised to discover the wounded Timias (III.v.30), first she blushes, then she feels “vnwonted smart:/ The point of pitty perced through her tender hart.”

Cheers, Jon Quitslund

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "James C. Nohrnberg" <[log in to unmask]>
>Here it seems arguable that we 
> should jump out of one allegory into another.  I.e., that the fertile and 
> fertilized Chrysogonee's untainted and "virginal" blood of nuriture could 
> well differ from that of other pregnant (or nursing) women seems probable 
> from the lines about Belphoebe, "Her berth was of the wombe of Morning dew, 
> / And her conception of the ioyous Prime, / And all her whole creation did 
> her shew / Pure and vnspotted from all loathly crime, / That is ingenerate 
> in fleshly slime.  /  So was this virgin borne, so was she bred..." (FQ 
> III.vi.3) -- to be taken with the messianic Psalm 110:3, KJV "...in the 
> beauties of holiness from the womb of the morning:  thou hast the dew of thy 
> youth" -- when supplemented by a notion found in The Golden Legend of 
> Jacobus de Voragine:  'The mode of the birth [of our Lord Jesus Christ] also 
> was miraculous.  It was above nature, by the fact that a virgin conceived; 
> above reason in that God was begotten; above the human condition, in that 
> the birth was painless [like that of the twins of Chrysogonee]; and above 
> what is customary, since the conception was by the Holy Spirit [sometimes 
> represented pictorially by sunbeam-like rays of light], for the Virgin begot 
> her Son not from human seed but from a mystic breath.  Indeed the Holy 
> Spirit took the most pure and most chaste blood of the Virgin [Mary] and out 
> of formed that body [of Jesus].  So it is that God showed a fourth wondrous 
> way of making man.  Anselm says:  "God can make man in four ways, namely, 
> without a man or a woman (as he made Adam), from a man without a woman (as 
> he made Eve), from a man and a woman (the usual way), and from a woman 
> without a man (as was done miraculously today [= Christmas day]).'  The 
> brood of Spenser's pelican-like Error seems to be bred or nourished on 
> something like the coalblack poetical antithesis of "the most pure and most 
> chaste blood of the Virgin" or Mother, even if that brood is also (on the 
> analogy of the worms bred in and of the Nile mud or its "fertile slime" 
> [I.i.21]) as it were virginally conceived.
> -- Jim N.
>