ABSTRACT
This essay was first published as part of a collection designed to stress the importance of religion in early modern British culture, an area neglected by scholars – particularly New Historicists, despite the lead given by Stephen Greenblatt in Renaissance Self-Fashioning (see above, pp. 126–8). I wanted to show that despite the worth of many analyses of Spenser’s religious beliefs, too many scholars had neglected to consider the relevance of his Irish experience to his conception of religion and the need to read the ongoing discussion of religion and politics in The Faerie Queene against the comments in the prose dialogue, A View of the Present State of Ireland. Ireland is traditionally only thought to be relevant to the later sections of the poem; I wanted to show that in the last three books which made up the second edition, many incidents specifically refer back to earlier events and invite the reader to go back and reformulate his or her judgements, broadening out an English context into an Irish one. Ireland, for Spenser, does not simply problematise certain relationships and make them more complex (although it does have that effect); ‘it also exists as the site of potential chaos where Englishness and its attendant certainties (truth) are turned against themselves in an orgy of violence, never to be redeemed’.
