        Andrew, you've convinced me to reverse my initial skepticism about the prolepsis of nursing before the birth narrative. Spenser is giving us the argument of his story before then giving us the story in full. It works--and without violating the parallel grammar. Your readings have a way of cutting through thickets, for which I am always grateful.

        The passage must remain a crux, of course, as Margaret, Tom, and Hannibal, have convinced me. Spenser's discomfort with the bloody fleshliness of normal childbirth must surely overlap his discomfort with the literality of the Catholic eucharist. If nothing else, the boar lurking beneath Venus's mons veneris as she dallies with the Father of Forms must convince us that the sacred, the profane, and the profanely sacred are never far asunder in the Faerie Queene.

        I wish I could get this entire discussion into my notes, but the notes for the Hackett edition are supposed to lie somewhere between the spareness of notes in anthologies and the extensive digests in the Longman tour-de-force.

Dot

At 02:52 PM 2/1/2006, you wrote:

(This actually makes me hesitate to agree with you about the prolepsis of nursing before the birth narrative is delivered (so to speak); it seems to me that Spenser is setting up the strangeness of their conception *and* subsequent nourishment -- i.e. by Venus and Diana -- from the first.)