RSA 2013: Spenser and the Human
Over the past few decades, posthumanist studies have questioned the usefulness of “the human” as a distinct ontological category. This work has stressed instead the uncertain boundaries between human and other forms of life, focusing especially on the effects of modern science, technology, ecology, and animal rights discourse on our understanding of what it means to be human. More recently, scholars of the early modern period have shown that an uncertainty about how to define the category of the human was in fact central to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thought. This panel proposes that Edmund Spenser’s work has been a neglected archive for scholarship on the category of the human. Given the wide variety of life forms that populate Spenser’s poetic and polemical worlds, his oeuvre allows us to appreciate the complexity of early modern definitions of the human in the context of poetic representation, religious and political debate, humanist philosophy, and emergent anatomical and scientific investigations. Papers for this panel might discuss figures like Talus, the False Florimell, Satyrane, or the Blatant Beast, all of whom collapse the category of the human with those of machine or beast; the problematic limits that Spenser places on the definition of the human in terms of ethical responses to others, as in his representation of Catholics or the Irish; or the problems posed by allegory, theology, and psychomachia for understandings of what it means to be a human creature.