ABSTRACT
This essay takes on, yet again for Spenser criticism, what Stephen Greenblatt has called “the great crux of Renaissance literature”: Guyon’s violent destruction of the Bower of Bliss, that curious, troubling, notoriously intemperate final statement on temperance in canto 12 of Book 2 in The Faerie Queene.1 But it approaches that crux through another: Guyon’s blush in canto 9. In looking into the workings of the blush in The Faerie Queene, and its relationship to temperance and wrath, I am also concerned with three interlinked areas: first, Spenser’s relationship to contemporary affect theory; then, Spenser’s relationship to the blush as confessor and less than competent adjudicator of boundaries and desire; and finally, when located in the Bower, the possible connections of the blush to Spenserian problems of selfhood and writing.
