ABSTRACT
Justice was widely regarded in the Renaissance as the sovereign virtue. ‘The moste excellent and incomparable vertue called iustice’, writes Elyot, ‘is so necessary and expedient for the gouernor of a publike weale, that without it none other vertue may be commendable, ne witte or any maner of doctrine profitable.’ This is not, of course, to suggest that a poet’s artistic successes and failures may infallibly be judged in accordance with the prescriptions of a body of inherited criticism; rather that in abandoning a certain literary ideal Spenser has sacrificed the artistic integrity of his poem. Instead of inventing an imaginative fiction to embody an ideal of justice, he rather crudely allegorizes contemporary events. As the concept of nature itself underwent a total transformation during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, so too the idea of natural law came, by the later eighteenth century, to mean the exact opposite of what it had meant for the orthodox Tudor humanist.
