ABSTRACT
The powerful Amazonian warrior nation is reduced to a community of domestic storytellers, and their condition as such is noteworthy: women tell stories in defeat and of their defeat, and they do so not in the more public arenas of the court and the battlefield, but at "home." Immediately after asserting the power of domesticated female words, Spenser has Radigund acknowledge their potential inefficacy as she imagines that they may need to be superseded by physical aggression. The charming power of women's narratives is allowed to stand for only two lines before it is neutralized. The associated images of female nurture with feminine discourse in The Faerie Queene cited sometimes record the power of women's words as threatening, sometimes deny them that power, and sometimes turn that power against them, as Sclaunder becomes "that shamefull Hag, the slaunder of her sexe".
