ABSTRACT
The early modern period’s imaginative projection of a heterogeneous, partly chaotic world no doubt supplied an incentive and certain materials for the making of early modern stories of chaos; but the stories are not to be understood as exercises in cosmology. Paradise Lost, most unusually giving precise conceptual form to what ordinarily remained a looser intuition, propounds a full-dress cosmology where the matter of creation retains a capacity for lawless or chaotic as well as regulated movement. The Faerie Queene engages, similarly, with the astronomical-astrological enquiries of the period, as for example in Book V’s finding of a narrative beginning in emergent cosmic disorder, or the Mutabilitie Cantos’ thematization of a lunar eclipse. Nevertheless, the motivation for such engagement remains dedicatedly political-historical and ethical-psychological: aspects of cosmic structure and process understood as real function here as components of a poetic cosmology, offered as metaphor whose proper sense is action, suffering and desire on the human scene.
