Virtus Without Telos, Or The Ethics Of Vulnerability In Early Modern England

The Pain of Reformation posits masculinity as an ethical condition, not just a social role, in Edmund Spenser's 1590 Faerie Queene. This shift in inquiry highlights heroic masculinity's propensity for violence and domination, and suggests the tensions inherent to a poem that purports "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline," as the "Letter of the Authors" famously avers. Rather than a didactic project that depends on creating an invulnerable masculine subject from the imposition of codified discipline, the 1590 Faerie Queene emerges as poem concerned with vulnerability, including a fundamental openness to bodily experience. In Joseph Campana's deft analysis, vulnerability becomes "the source of a new understanding of masculinity and ethics, which might be united in the term virtue" (8). This book does not just attend to vulnerability as the underside of violence in Spenser's expansive narrative. Instead, Campana argues that "the 1590 Faerie Queene is in fact an allegory of vulnerability, one that disarms and reforms masculinity as a project of ethics" (204). Violence becomes subject to critique, and the programmatic habitus of traditional virtue is superseded by a reformed model of masculinity attuned to pain and suffering as well as pleasure and joy.

Sensation, not governance, organizes this new masculinity. While Campana acknowledges that a powerful Protestant ethos runs through Spenser's poem, he connects this militant form of self-mastery to the trauma of violence suffered in the wake of England's break with Rome. The violence of the Reformation suggests that an impervious moral identity is only a meager defense against, and therefore an insufficient solution to, the experience of pain wrought by decades of religious upheaval. Spenser instead elaborates what Campana calls a "sympathetic sociality" (168 passim), which might mend the harms of a community rent by generations of suffering. An ethics founded on an acknowledgment of shared vulnerability reforms the heroic masculine subject and provides new grounds for ethical action that acknowledges the bodily experiences of all those involved.

As exemplars of this reformation, the knights of the 1590 Faerie Queene are caught in a bind between inviolable heroism and vulnerable compassion. Campana identifies this aporia as characteristic of sixteenth-century poetry, so that Spenser's effort to create an aesthetics that expresses the flesh's sensitivities as a new foundation for ethical action is rendered through the struggles of the Knights of Holiness, Temperance, and Chastity. To reformulate masculinity as an ethical condition—one that re-members classical virtus—is to create a new model of virtue responsive to the Reformation's manifold harms. Rather than predicating ethical life on prescriptive norms or moralistic rules, virtue, as Campana analyzes it across Spenser's 1590 narrative, emerges from shared relations of affect, energy, and sensation. Rethinking Spenser's ethical project makes a profound difference to the ways we might read the Legends of Holiness, Temperance, and Chastity.

In charting Redcrosse Knight's difficulties in book 1, Campana acknowledges the appeal of a dematerializing moral regime that asserts control over pain, violence, and suffering. Yet, even if we recognize the defensive reassurance that the fantasy of rational control over insensate matter might hold, a series of unsettling encounters in the Legend of Holiness works to undermine this model of masculine virtue. Chapter 1, "Reading Bleeding Trees: The Poetics of Other People's Pain," focuses on the Redcrosse Knight's inability to respond to the suffering of others, and questions "how we witness and respond to violence" even when that violence is supposedly sanctioned as part of the purifying process of ethical reform (73). Campana connects the episode in which Redcrosse Knight encounters a bleeding tree with the iconoclastic violence of England's early decades of religious Reformation, and argues that the Knight of Holiness's inability to bear compassionate witness to the imprisoned Fradubio's pain presents the problem of "suffering matter" (19) after Christ's passion was culturally...