ABSTRACT
The etymological import of Spenserian emotion can be seen clearly in the last canto of Book III of The Faerie Queene. Inside the House of Busirane, Edmund Spenser’s exploration of movement is enriched by analogies with other kinds of intricate movements. Spenser and Gabriel Harvey are two thinkers trying through various strategies to get to a core understanding of what human emotion is. Central to that attempt is a development of the ancient analogies between human bodies and the earth. Passions in the Renaissance, as Gail Kern Paster has shown, are intimately connected to bodily processes and theories about them. In his introduction to Philip Sidney's New Arcadia, Maurice Evans writes, 'The conflict between right reason and unregulated passion is fundamental in Sidney’s work'. Harvey’s two accounts of the earthquake strongly suggest that Harvey, like Sidney and Spenser, is striving to accommodate a new concept of emotion in the English language.
