To Elisabeth Chaghaf p'soint, I think Una’s designation from the beginning as white instead of fair is an important point to consider. Does white signify a different ontology than fair? Consider the argument to Canto 2: The guilefull great Enchaunter parts / The Redcrosse Knight from Truth: / Into whose stead faire falshood steps.” Also, Archimago first attempts to tempt RC with a “faire-forged Spright.” Fidessa is fair, Lucifera is fair, but Una is the only character designated as white in Book 1.
I’m doing some work on the “whiteness” of Christianity. There is a medieval tradition, that carries over into the Renaissance, of linking whiteness to female virgin martyrs. In The Golden Legend, for example, St. Margaret
"is said of a precious gem…that is named a margaret. Which gem is white, little and virtuous. So the blessed Margaret was white by virginity, little by humility, and virtuous by operation of miracles. The virtue of this stone is said to be against effusion of blood, against passion of the heart, and to confortation of the spirit. In like wise the blessed Margaret had virtue against shedding of her blood by constancy, for in her martyrdom she was most constant, and also against the passion of the heare, that is to say, temptation of the devil. For she overcame the devil by victory, and to the confortation of the spirit by doctrine, for by her doctrine she comforted much people, and converted to the faith of Christ."
A lot going on here—a gem named margaret that has some metonymic link to the saint. In any event, perhaps Una needs to be "white" in order to mark her as different from the fair Eastern seductress of epic and romance. I like Jon Quitslund’s formulation of Spenser as establishing some characters as “a race apart”—as well as his point that the phenomenology of blood in Spenser needs greater attention. Arguably, fair skin becomes a site of anxiety in early modern race thinking because it cannot signify race/lineage/descent/geographical origin in the same way that black skin is imagine to. If an Ethiopian queen can look at a picture of St. George and give birth to a fair daughter, fair skin problematically marks descent—and as a side note, perhaps Heliodorus, after whom Tasso patterns his tale, had some knowledge of albinism, even if its causes were unexplainable at his time. Spenser could have seen in Heliodorus and Tasso that fair skin is not always an accurate signifier of race or lineage. And, the distinction between whiteness and fairness, of course, has a racial legacy in terms of discrimination against Jews and the Irish (not all white people are truly white).
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