Spenser’s Ruins and the Art of Recollection by Rebeca Helfer (review)

To assist remembrance, the art of memory developed by the ancients and refined in early modernity postulates images and places in imagined “memory theatres” of the mind. Although Rebeca Helfer’s fine and resourceful study explores Edmund Spenser’s engagement with this art, readers wishing to learn about it had best go elsewhere, to Frances Yates among others. As Helfer’s preface explains, she addresses it instead as “a story about history, … about how the ruins of the past survive in the memory of later minds.” Various writers used this discourse, she argues, to challenge “historical fictions of permanence with fictional histories about perpetual recollection”: a process of edifying reconstruction. In this sense, she maintains, the art of memory is “fundamental to the entire Spenserian project” and engaged therein by “the topos of ruin” as it may yield “cultural renewal” and interrogate “the model of epic as handmaiden to empire and fictions of imperial permanence.” Helfer’s novel approach to Spenser aims to demolish Stephen Greenblatt’s identification of this most demanding and artfully complex poet with “the passionate worship of imperialism” in Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), and it justly does so.

Especially addressing Spenser’s major poems The Shepheardes Calender (1579) and Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), Helfer further considers some of his minor poetry collected in Complaints (1593) – The Ruines of Time and The Ruines of Rome (apt for inquiries into ruination) and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe – besides his early poetic contributions to Theatre for Worldlings (1569) and his late prose dialogue, Viewe of the Present State of Ireland. She interpolates some extended discussions of Plato, Cicero, Augustine, and Chaucer, and her recognition of Plato’s Spenserian importance, often underestimated since around 1990, is salutary.

Though canvassing numerous secondary sources, the argument cites relatively few early modern ones, and some readings seem more appropriate than others. When Milton calls Spenser “a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas,” this is not “damning … with faint praise” but allusively adjusts Horace’s famous praise of Homer’s instructiveness – “melius Chrysippo et Crantore” – to extoll Spenser as a Christian Homer (Epistulae 2.2–4).⁵ Alma’s castle becomes a “memory theatre” where “saving the soul and mending the psyche” is “an art of recollecting the past, individually and collectively.” Yet, though involving memory and history, this episode centrally allegorizes the challenges of fallen flesh, depicted as a siege of Alma’s castle, to Temperance’s bodily and spiritual discipline. In Helfer’s account Spenser is chiefly a tale-telling historical poet. However, his poetry also has a powerful “vertical” dimension, informed by transcendental aspirations, theology, the book of Revelation, and Platonizing doctrines of love, beauty, and poetic furor (which Helfer assumes was a mere cliché). So he also wrote the soaring Fowre Hymnes, anagogical allegories including Una and Redcross’s betrothal, and episodes such as the Mount of Contemplation, the Garden of Adonis, and the Graces’ dance on Mount Acidale, and rhapsodized about feminine beauty’s heavenly splendour throughout much of his poetry.

As Helfer says, she is “hardly the first to respond to Greenblatt’s analysis of Spenser.” It can also be debunked through historically formalist recognition of the revisionary impact of Christianity on heroic poetry in early modernity, through which Virgil’s celebration of the Roman imperium as a vehicle of divine providence, and the whole epic repertoire, had to be reinterpreted to acknowledge the insufficiency of earthly realms (however needful for social order and thus deserving of heroic support) relative to God’s heaven. This revision of classical epic precursors, outlined in my Allegory and Epic (2000), had a long history before Milton’s Paradise Lost.⁶ In The Faerie Queene’s Contemplation episode, the envisioned New Jerusalem far transcends even the faery queen Gloriana’s capital city, Cleopolis. And the poem celebrates her far more than Elizabeth: Spenser avowedly creates Gloriana by extrapolating this “true glorious type” – idealized and purged of imperfections – from Elizabeth (I.pr.4...