ABSTRACT
Within Spenser’s fictional projection of his courtship, the lady becomes a donna angelica who reflects the multiplicity of Venus and, he especially implies, who should in due time affirm the bond between Venus Caelestis and Venus Vulgaris, the bond between love of the divine and honourably mutual human love. Amoretti reveals Spenser, like Sidney before him in Astrophil and Stella, ingeniously overwriting Petrarch. At the heart of Petrarch’s Rime sparse lies the myth of Apollo and Daphne. One of Sidney’s main tactics for naturalizing the Petrarchan sonnet sequence into England and creating meta-Petrarchan verse is to set a quite different myth at the heart of Astrophil and Stella: the Judgement of Paris rewritten as the Judgement of Apollo. This chapter argues that Spenser similarly sets a personal mythic paradigm at the heart of Amoretti.
