ABSTRACT
In Book 5, canto 7 of The Faerie Queene, Astraea as divine patron of Justice gives way to the Egyptian deities Isis and Osiris. Among the effects of this maneuver is to replace the myth of virgin withdrawal with one of militant sexuality. Isis doesn’t just marry Osiris, she goes forth to gather his scattered remains and, when the phallus turns up missing, fashions a replacement for it.1 She is an apt sponsor for Britomart, whose virile masquerade ends, in Book 5, with her determination to put the phallus back where it belongs. But the turn to sexuality in Book 5 does more than close down the genderbending of the middle books. By carrying the analogy between Britomart and Isis to the point of deification it raises potentially awkward questions about the divine sanction of secular rule. Finally, it turns those questions back on allegory as a poetic method. In doing so, it not only questions the prince’s divine warrant, it also unsettles the metaphysical basis of the symbolic mode that issues the warrant.2
