The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity by Joseph Campana (review)

In Joseph Campana's incisive study The Pain of Reformation, the Spenser of the 1590 Faerie Queene becomes a manifestly ethical poet. With admirable lucidity, Campana demonstrates, much as previous generations of scholarship have done for poets such as Virgil and Dante, that Spenser should not be read merely as an inveterate propagandist for the ideology of his time. While it is presently a scholarly commonplace to dismiss as naïve those readings that construe Virgil as a straightforward defender of the Roman imperium or Dante as an outright condoner of Christendom's infelicities, Spenser is still too often implicitly read as the Elizabethan mouthpiece of English Protestant nationalism. Such a facile assessment of The Faerie Queene (and more generally of Spenser himself) overlooks many dimensions of the narrative, including most importantly questions surrounding gender and the constraints of masculinity. Indeed, the nature of sexuality and the dynamics of gender construction within the poem are still vigorously contested areas of inquiry. Campana's impressive study, which "examines a triangulation of vulnerability, masculinity, and the ethics common to many literary writers grappling with that peculiar admixture of triumph and trauma in the wake of massive religious and political changes" (3), achieves a great deal in elucidating how Spenser registered the importance of vulnerability within his understanding of Christian virtue. The result is an impressively original intervention in Spenser studies that reveals some of the ramifications of the Protestant Reformation in English literature by charting how tropes of masculinity were aesthetically, not just culturally, refashioned. Campana suggests that the poem assumes a greater ethical urgency by foisting a decisive claim upon its readers: "[m]asculinity, or manliness, must . . . be reformed to accommodate vulnerability and an openness to the pain of others" (4).

Campana's close reading of The Faerie Queene is consistently informed by a sophisticated awareness of the poem's intertextual relationship with figures such as Virgil, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, but this functions more to illustrate Spenser's unique ethical vision than to establish his dependence on previous templates of poetic practice. What emerges in Campana's study as the most important notion for understanding Spenser's poetic endeavor is the prospect of vulnerability, which, in this reading, "provides a critical alternative to violence" (12). Whereas previous poetic analogues supplied ample imaginative resources for collapsing martial prowess and masculinity into a single conception, "Spenser recalibrates the age-old dynamic between love and war in heroic poetry, making vulnerability—an openness to sensation and affect that implies an ethical openness to others—the poem's governing ideal" (23). Here we witness an astute interpretation of Spenser that both gains solid traction on the poem while also protecting itself against the charge of anachronism (cf. 11-13). By taking careful strides in expounding his idiosyncratic heuristic of vulnerability, Campana shifts the focus away from polysemous terms such as "violence" and "embodiment" toward a more nuanced conception of mutual human orientation that significantly deepens our understanding of affect and subjection. After briefly positioning itself in relation to religious historiography in the introduction, Campana's argument unfolds in six chapters.

Chapter 1, "Reading Bleeding Trees: The Poetics of Other People's Pain," addresses one of the affective dimensions of (Protestant) Christianity's central paradoxes: reverence for the archetypal figure of a suffering Christ coupled with a robust disdain, instilled through Christian worship practices, for compassion and pity. As a poet, Spenser writes against a religious cultural backdrop wherein a protracted emphasis on pain can initiate a dangerous awareness of bodily sensation that must, in turn, be controlled through devotional observance. An inordinate emphasis on matters of the flesh can evolve tempestuously into forms of idolatry, as the physical, embodied nature of suffering occludes more spiritual senses. The ideological dimensions of this dynamic can manifest diverse forms within cultural behavior, but Spenser signals them, according to Campana, through the Legend of Holiness. Una, the figurehead of Protestant veracity, sets...