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5. Eumnestes’ ‘‘immortall scrine’’: Spenser’s Archive Like Chaucer, Spenser often finds or pretends to find in earlier books the enabling source of his own poetry, and for this reason, among others, he describes Chaucer’s writing as the wellhead of his own. A number of Spenser ’s interpreters have sought the meaning of his deliberate reliance on a written tradition in pure textuality or in its effect on a community of readers .1 While not rejecting their many valid perceptions, I want to suggest that this reliance also be referred to the claim the Spenserian poet made for it, particularly in The Faerie Queene. In Spenser’s most massively allusive poem, the significance of earlier works is inseparable from the idea of antiquity, an idea in which these works are themselves implicated. ‘‘Whylome as antique stories tellen vs,’’ Spenser wrote in imitation of the beginning of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale—‘‘Whylom, as olde stories tellen vs’’—and thereby he speci fically placed Chaucer’s work in a tradition of antique writings, even as he recalled Chaucer’s own placement of The Knight’s Tale in such a tradition.2 Antiquity, as Spenser develops this idea in The Faerie Queene, consists of plain truth and timeless admonitions; it is an idealized place of mythic patterns and an undefiled ‘‘well’’ of simple purity.3 Antiquity resides in memorial scrolls and permanent records, and these participate in Clio’s ‘‘volume of Eternitie,’’ a volume that always surpasses yet ever illumines human memory (III.iii.4). For the Renaissance generally and more particularly for Spenser, the sense of a literary tradition and of the words and forms that constitute it is more idealistic and mysterious than in a modern poetics of loss and displacement. It is far more eclectic, including skepticism and doubt but also affirming wisdom, virtue, and truth. Often, as Spenser describes this tradition, it is recorded memory, tied intrinsically to the very idea of words, written records, and the mnemonic working of the human mind. Predictably, many of the words Spenser uses to describe recorded memory are so revealing as to suggest his selecting them for the reminders—the associations or reminiscences—built into their history. Among these is the arresting word scrine, from Latin scrinium, which first appears in the Proem 79 80 Reading the Allegorical Intertext to Book I, where the poet asks his muse to ‘‘Lay forth out of . . . [her] euerlasting scryne / The antique rolles’’ of Faerie Land.4 Cooper’s Thesaurus , or treasury, of the Roman language defines scrinium as ‘‘a coffer or other like place wherein jewels or secrete things are kept.’’5 Stephanus’ Thesaurus linguae latinae derives scrinium from secernendum, ‘‘setting apart, secreting, secluding ,’’ and defines it as a place in which precious things and mysteries (secreta) are preserved and protected (servantur).6 Not surprisingly in view of these definitions, the word scrine also carries the more specific meaning ‘‘shrine’’ during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.7 Also in view of them, Spenser’s description of the rolls that lie in his muse’s ‘‘euerlasting scryne’’ as ‘‘hidden still’’—that is, hidden always, secretly, silently, motionlessly —makes sense, but it is primarily in relation to the sacred meaning ‘‘shrine’’ that the word everlasting at this point does so. In the chamber of Eumnestes, or Good Memory, within the brain turret of the House of Alma, the word still recurs in the phrase ‘‘recorded still’’ describing Eumnestes’ operation and carries with it something of its mysterious force in the first Proem. In connection with Eumnestes’ function, the word scrine likewise appears, characterized this time not as ‘‘euerlasting’’ but, with added point, as ‘‘immortall’’ (II.ix.56). Both Cooper and Stephanus include among their examples of the meaning of scrinium Catullus’ phrase ‘‘librariorum . . . scrinia’’—the booksellers’ containers of manuscripts or rolls.8 This example bears on the furnishing of Eumnestes’ chamber, which is ‘‘all . . . hangd about with rolles, / And old records from auncient times deriu’d, / Some made in books, some in long parchment scrolles’’ (ix.57). The association of scrinia, or scrines, with books, records, and sacred relics goes deep into the past. Under the late Roman emperors, there were four types of public scrines for various kinds of historical records (scrinia libellorum, memoriae, epistularum, and epistularum Graecarum).9 The scrines of monasteries or churches were the places, whether chests, cupboards, niches, or rooms, where the enabling instruments and authorizing documents that pertained to the rights...

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