A couple of random tidbits on faking it, where "it" is Spenser's use of technical vocabulary.
Catherine Bates, in her new book _Masculinity and the Hunt, Wyatt to Spenser_ (Oxford, 2013), writes, regarding Spenser's hunting language:
"Although he would no doubt have been familiar with the favoured pastime of the noblemen he served . . . his similes do not appear to be based on personal observation or first-hand experience. When using technical hunting terms to describe the behaviour of animals, he has a way of doing so either self-consciously, as if he were quoting directly from the manuals, or vaguely, often making up his own words or giving idiosyncratic meanings to existing terms, in some cases with confusing results" (244-45).
and from Sarah Powrie, "Spenser’s Mutabilitie and the Indeterminate Universe," SEL 53.1 (2013): 73-89:
"Though Mutabilitie’s scientific vocabulary is not early modern, it must be remembered that Spenser is thinking through the implications of an emergent science. The consequences of the Copernican hypothesis were still unrealized in the 1590s: Francis Bacon had not yet formulated the inductive method; Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton had not drafted their laws of motion. What is significant is Spenser’s intuition that accounts of time and material change will need to be radically reformulated in the wake of the Copernican paradigm" (79).
I don't have the expertise to confirm or deny these observations (though they both sound quite plausible) but what's fascinating to me is juxtaposing the two so we see an ancient and well-traveled discourse such as hunting on the one hand, and an emerging scientific discourse that doesn't quite exist yet but is "in the air" on the other hand, both getting essentially the same treatment in Spenser's fiction.
So now I'm wondering whether Spenser makes up his own version of a discourse because he genuinely doesn't know the terminology, or because the made-up version is more easily bent to his allegorical purposes (in fact the made-up aspect might well be a *result* of such bending)? Or both?
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Craig A. Berry
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"... getting out of a sonnet is much more
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