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Inaug. diss.--Freiburg. / Bibliography: p. [5]-6.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Bryn Mawr college, 1908. / Vita. "Table of editions to which reference is made": 3d prelim. leaf.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Bryn Mawr college, 1908. / Vita. "Table of editions to which reference is made": 3d prelim. leaf. "Table of editions to which reference is made": p. [viii].

History in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene Book V and his View of the Present State of Ireland reflects the basic assumptions and characteristics of Elizabethan territorial history, a form observed in the geographic basis of chorography, in the metaphoric expression of the British past, and in the contemporary English enthusiasm for state, county, and city histories. William Lambarde's A Perambulation of Kent, the earliest English model for Spenser's territorial history, employs the antiquary's tentative empirical methodology in a study of sources newly freed of myth, legend, and unreliable antiquity. Accepting the developmental historical perspective of the territorial historians, Spenser in his View discusses the susceptibility of certain positive laws to the ravages of time and circumstance and argues for a reformation of those laws and their administration in Ireland. Similarly, justice in book V is a virtue of reformation that requires a "physician" who diagnoses, cures, and prescribes a diet of new, well-ordered laws for the patient-state, the primary danger to "recural" existing in laws abrogated or perverted since their inception. While accepting the workings of divine and natural law in history, Spenser focuses on the justiciar's secular role in terms of political more than providential causation, legal more than moral justice, and practical more than theoretical law. As England's first justiciar Artegall presents a righteous response to original tyranny in a prelegal society and acquits himself on the charges of "unmanly guile" and "reproachful cruelty" by representing human justice based on laws responsive to season. In the historical domains of Book V Arthur's presence exemplifies providence in human justice, Artegall's actions man's secular control over responsive lawmaking and territorial rebellion, and Radigund's tale the imposition of natural law on justice. The legal and topical content of Book V's poetic journeys suggest the territorial historian's "perambulation" in which Spenser's heroes learn the history of each canto's territory before a reforming justice can operate. As feigned antique history merges with topical event, the Legend of Justice becomes an innovative, optimistic, and uniquely Elizabethan glimpse of new territory.

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Renaissance patriarchy maintained very clear distinctions between what was appropriately "masculine" and "feminine." Modern feminist criticism and research have tried to dispel some of the old illusions, and so they offer a fresh approach to evaluating the personal and social implications of gender in the Renaissance. Such perspectives can be specifically applied for enhanced appreciation of Spenser's Faerie Queene, after an initial assessment of Renaissance patriarchy itself. / The Faerie Queene, we find, questions many important conventions of gender roles in Renaissance patriarchal society. Spenser crosses the familiar boundaries of appropriate or accepted female social status and options, and situates both males and females in roles which seemingly challenge the existing conventions by advancing the possibility of a new perspective. Spenser examines femininity from a specifically feminine point of view and invites a broadened understanding of the feminine. He portrays many different aspects of femininity and his titular heroine, Britomart, approximates the modern androgyne. The poem suggests a variety of alternative gender roles for both females and males, and also uses symbolic aspects of gender, so that characters ultimately cease to be gender-specific in their significance. That too tends to soften distinctions between males and females, by allegorically representing the self in such a way that it is seen to have both masculine and feminine aspects. / Spenser's attempt to broaden his readers' understanding and valuation of the feminine and his suggestions of alternative roles for both genders, helped open the door to new freedom and equality for women by inviting redefinition or revision of culturally received notions of gender and its personal and social implications.