ABSTRACT
This essay forms part of the second of two chapters on Spenser in The Invention of the Renaissance Woman. The book as a whole crosses traditional scholarly boundaries between major authors and their principal texts, minor genres (paradox, dialogue) and works, and the non-literary, in order to examine a body of texts which are united in their common concern to redefine the nature of woman. The author explores how such texts – long poems, didactic treatises, prose fictions – devise common strategies for simultaneously defending womankind’s capacity for political virtue and denigrating women for the exercise of such virtue. Benson argues that, for Spenser, chastity was the private expression of a virtue which expressed itself publicly as justice, and thus provided women with a capacity for action in the political as well as the domestic and moral spheres, a subject explored in Books III–V of The Faerie Queene. In the chapter from which this extract is taken, she sets the poem in the specific context of the tracts written in defence of Elizabeth’s right to rule as a woman, and suggests that learning the vocabulary and premises of the controversy makes it possible to understand the political delicacy of Spenser’s handling of the problem of female government.
