ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the ways that Spensers work engages a form of nationalism rooted in early modern debates about trade and the proper use of wealth. Spenser developed his economic ideas in dialogue with other members of the Leicester Sidney circle, a group of forward Protestants at the court of Queen Elizabeth I who encouraged overseas trade as a way to strengthen Englands relationship with other Protestant nations and to check SpanishHabsburg military expansion. The expansion of mercantile voyages in the sixteenth century, as recorded in travel narratives by Richard Hakluyt and others, also introduced new modes of commercial heroism. Spensers poem retains a Stoic distrust of luxury and ostentation, though it does not go so far as to endorse Elizabethan policies against hoarding and luxury imports. In Spensers England, bullion was delivered, weighed, cast into ingots, cut into blanks, rolled to the correct thickness, and stamped into coins in the London Tower.
