SPENSER replaces Chaucer as the exemplary practitioner of the romance genre for the sixteenth century in England. By this time European chivalry was in decline and Protestant England felt a sense of separation from the Catholic Mediterranean world, a world whose commercial dominance had become destabilized by western overseas exploration and expansion. Though Spenser admired his great English predecessor and borrowed from his Squire's Tale, a chief literary source in the Faerie Queene comes from the Mediterranean: Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1516). Ariosto's poem has three primary centers of interest: the siege of Paris and the final defeat of the Saracen army, the madness of Orlando, and the loves of Bradamante and Ruggiero.

Through the influence of Ariosto's work the Orient makes an occasional appearance in Spenser's romance – for example, in Books Four (the Legend of Friendship) and Five (the Legend of Justice). Spenser's Aemylia, in the episode of the Cave of Lust (Book 4, Canto 7) is modelled on the Saracen woman, Isabella, in the robbers cave of Book 12 of Orlando Furioso. We find in these parallel episodes the depiction of the male Saracen as sexual threat, familiar from medieval romance. In Spenser, Aemylia is captured by the “accursed Carle of hellish kind,/ The shame of men, and plague of womankind” (Book 4, Canto 7, stanza 18) when she goes to keep a clandestine rendezvous with her beloved squire of low degree. Aemylia's father, a Lord, would not agree to her choice of beloved, and so she had planned to run away with her squire in secret.