ABSTRACT
It is not often remembered, but the Renaissance was a time for the renascence of slavery in the economics of many Western European powers (if not actually in Northern Europe itself). Not often thought of as sharing with antiquity this particular aspect of economic organization, the Renaissance is more usually regarded as a time of the birth of the free and autonomous individual. Yet, if we push some of Fredric Jameson’s arguments about genre to their logical conclusions, we might better understand how the Renaissance was rightly named for a rebirth of some classical forms and that, indeed, the resurgence of the genre of the epic in the Renaissance speaks to the resurgence of slavery, by which European powers were building their new Atlantic empires. Given Jameson’s understanding of genre, we may be enabled to see how, in two strangely parallel scenes, The Faerie Queene may be aiming to do the work which epic poems usually do, to wit, mediating the contradictions (that is, the internally irrational elements) of a slave economy, particularly as slavery was just becoming an element in the overseas economy of Renaissance England’s growing imperial interests. By inspecting these two episodes, Guyon’s con frontation of Mammon in Book II (the Book of Temperance) and Britomart’s slaying of the Amazon Queen Radigund in Book V (the Book of Justice), I hope to show how a properly theorized notion of genre can force us to adopt far more culturally embedded and site-specific reading practices. While I can only begin to articulate the range of problems raised by such a global suggestion-about an entire genre in a quickly-changing historical period-it will be useful to begin by asking how we must read the text to find the relationship of this particular late sixteenth-century English epic, by a wouldbe courtier to Queen Elizabeth I, to the activity of pan-Atlantic slavery during the Renaissance. Interestingly, the two episodes in which Spenser seems most specifically to meditate on the problem of slave and wage labor are cruces in the only books of his epic to focus on any of the twelve classical Aristotelian virtues, that is, the books of Temperance and Justice (unlike, for example, Holiness, or Chastity which Aristotle does not, of course, mention). In such a way the epic appears to insist that in these episodes it deals most specifically with issues which have resonance back to Greek times.
