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Remembering the Death of Turnus: Spenser's Faerie Queene and the Ending of the Aeneid*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Lars-Håkan Svensson
Lars-Håkan Svensson*
Affiliation:
Linköping University
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Abstract

Most of the key episodes in book 1 of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590) replay famous passages in Virgil's Aeneid. However, the concluding canto, describing the Redcrosse knight's betrothal to Una, is based on Maffeo Vegio's fifteenth-century Supplementum to the Aeneid, while, surprisingly, the Aeneid's much-disputed ending appears in triplicate in early sections of book 1. This article examines the place and function of book 1’s three imitations of the Aeneid's ending, while also relating them to Spenser's appropriations of the ending in later books of The Faerie Queene. It argues that, in making Redcrosse assume the position of Aeneas in largely negative contexts, book 1 opposes standard sixteenth-century interpretations of Aeneas's pietas, whereas later books of The Faerie Queene usually conform to prevalent early modern interpretations of the moral import of this powerful cultural memory.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 64 , Issue 2 , Summer 2011 , pp. 430 - 471
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 Renaissance Society of America

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Footnotes

*

I would like to express my deep gratitude to Åke Bergvall, Gunilla Florby, and Per Sivefors for generously taking time to read and comment on earlier versions of this essay. Likewise, I am much indebted to Jan Anward for inspiring discussions about linguistic interaction and recontextualization, and to Roger Sell and Anthony Johnson for providing a forum, at a crucial moment, for developing my ideas about Spenser and cultural memory. Finally, I want to thank the two anonymous readers at Renaissance Quarterly for making me rethink some old thoughts that I had half discarded, and for forcing me to articulate new ones that would never have occurred to me but for them.

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