In each successive book of The Faerie Queene, the titular virtue, however uncertainly defined, nevertheless continually asserts itself as a criterion in relation to which all moral interpretation is obliged to proceed. That is true not only for the hero and minor characters directly associated with each book, but likewise for those who, as it were, wander in from the different interpretative environments of the other books in which they had originally appeared. Thus for example Redcross, in the opening cantos of Books Two and Three, is perceived through the filter of local interpretative conditions not so much as the embodiment of holiness, as an exemplary figure first of temperance (II.i.4), then of chastity (III.i.24); and Britomart, initially a champion of chastity in her own right, is reinterpreted in Book Five as a subordinate figure representing a mere “part of Iustice” (V.vii.3). Nor is it only the characters, but the moral climates themselves of earlier books, that are cast in a different light in retrospect: stories that had looked complete or even incomplete on their own terms, are revisited in later books as raw material for a new interpretative machinery. The Mount of Contemplation is reconstituted as the Chamber of Eumnestes, and the Bower of Bliss remade first as the Garden of Adonis, again as the Temple of Venus, then yet again as Mount Acidale, in each case being transformed into something that could not have been predicted and would not have made sense from the perspectives of the former books in which similar motifs were seen.