ABSTRACT
The category Royal Psalms is concise but oversimplified, anachronistic, and fuzzy around the edges. In political terms, by portraying Queen Elizabeth through Una as both Sapience and the True Church, Spenser vigorously supports her claim to be supreme governor of the English Church. Christian exegetes assume with Mowinckel that the divinity was still taken literally, but they deny that the divinity in question was Egyptian. They affirm that the epithets necessarily prophesy a Messiah so divine as to be begotten by God. Besides defining terms and providing background, this history has not advanced his argument much, since it is impossible to pin down one typical Hebrew concept of a king's divinity. This whole debate about Royal Psalms and other Messianic texts among biblical scholars parallels the scholarly disagreements about Spenser's equations of his queen with Christ: both sets of debaters are arguing as to whether the phrases denote a literal apotheosis, conventional courtly rhetoric, or something in between.
