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Cosmopolitan Romance: Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and the Fiction of Imperial Justice
DOI link for Cosmopolitan Romance: Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and the Fiction of Imperial Justice
Cosmopolitan Romance: Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and the Fiction of Imperial Justice book
Cosmopolitan Romance: Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and the Fiction of Imperial Justice
DOI link for Cosmopolitan Romance: Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and the Fiction of Imperial Justice
Cosmopolitan Romance: Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and the Fiction of Imperial Justice book
ABSTRACT
The previous chapter suggests that the works of fiction and translation by Anthony Munday and Sir John Harington were shaped by the cosmopolitan perspective of Edmund Campion and other Catholic exiles, even as these two writers viewed themselves as opposed to the politics of Catholic exiles in other respects. In particular, I suggest that their fictional works and some of their other writings translate into secularized form the concept of papal supremacy, imagined by Catholic exiles such as Sander and Allen as laying the foundation for papal claims for the right to depose heretical or tyrannical leaders. In the fictional works by Harington and Munday, we encounter again and again characters such as Emperor Traianus in Harington’s A New Discourse and Robin Hood in Munday’s Earl of Huntington plays, who serve to correct the conscience of the crown in ways that are reminiscent of Campion’s Bishop Ambrose in his Latin play, Ambrosia. This chapter considers similar forms of cosmopolitan identity within the context of two canonical fictional works, Philip Sidney’s The New Arcadia and Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, both of which provide insight into the ways that writers imagined order and justice within the international sphere.