The Pain of Reformation argues that Edmund Spenser's 1590 Faerie
Queene represents an extended meditation on emerging notions of
physical, social, and affective vulnerability in Renaissance
England. Histories of violence, trauma, and injury have dominated
literary studies, often obscuring vulnerability, or an openness to
sensation, affect, and aesthetics that includes a wide range of
pleasures and pains. This book approaches early modern sensations
through the rubric of the vulnerable body, explores the emergence
of notions of shared vulnerability, and illuminates a larger
constellation of masculinity and ethics in post-Reformation
England. Spenser's era grappled with England's precarious political
position in a world tense with religious strife and fundamentally
transformed by the doctrinal and cultural sea changes of the
Reformation, which had serious implications for how masculinity,
affect, and corporeality would be experienced and represented.
Intimations of vulnerability often collided with the tropes of
heroic poetry, producing a combination of defensiveness, anxiety,
and shame. It has been easy to identify predictably violent
formations of early modern masculinity but more difficult to see
Renaissance literature as an exploration of vulnerability. The
underside of representations of violence in Spenser's poetry was a
contemplation of the precarious lives of subjects in
post-Reformation England. Spenser's adoption of the allegory of
Venus disarming Mars, understood in Renaissance Europe as an
allegory of peace, indicates that The Faerie Queene is a heroic
poem that militates against forms of violence and war that
threatened to engulf Europe and devastate an England eager to
militarize in response to perceived threats from within and
without. In pursuing an analysis, disarmament, and redefinition of
masculinity in response to a sense of shared vulnerability,
Spenser's poem reveals itself to be a vital archive of the way
gender, violence, pleasure, and pain were understood.
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