Looking beyond the official portrait of Spenser — dedicated to the fashioning of virtuous Protestant subjects — this book will hearten anyone seeking an alternative to overly pious or hegemonic readings of The Faerie Queene. Instead, it pictures a quite different kind of Reformation: a re-forming of the Reformation formation of the virtuous subject as masculine (virtus), heroic, invulnerable, and immune to feeling. Unlike psychoanalytic or sociocultural studies of Renaissance masculinity, this book offers a distinctively ethical reading. Where, for Foucault, the Greeks had found virtue in self-mastery and the moderation of pleasure, for the Protestant subject — for whom pleasure was largely proscribed and affect suppressed — “[e]thical virility. .. would have to result not from moderation but from an. .. openness to sensation and affect, pleasure and pain” (10).

The book insists that Spenser’s attention to vulnerability is “transformative” and a vocabulary of reformation persists throughout. The effect — as Spenser is variously said to repurpose, recalibrate, refashion, reconstitute, redefine, reconstruct, reshape, and re-script masculinity — is to keep him firmly in charge as the knowing author who is in full control of his project and knows exactly what he is about. Although the book declines to take a psychoanalytic approach, however, the model to which it reverts is that of the return of the repressed as, with or without the poet’s permission, alternative pictures of a vulnerable, feeling masculinity emerge as the “underside, or shadow” of officially endorsed, state-sponsored violence (11).

The book traces the all-too-Virgilian tension between the demands of national epic to fit approved modes of martial masculinity and the exorbitant costs of doing so. In the case of a sixteenth-century, post-Reformation, Protestant epic, this tension is further played out between the obligation to play the good Christian soldier, on the one hand, and to imitate a Christ-like charity, on the other: a contradiction that lies at the heart of Pauline Christianity and that is neatly symptomized in the borrowed armor that sits so uncomfortably on the Redcrosse Knight. Required to exemplify a fantasized invulnerability, Spenser’s armed knights find themselves consigned to an increasingly robotic violence as they are estranged from their bodies and alienated from their labor. As the ideology of self-mastery or temperance proves ultimately destructive of such subjects and of poetry, Spenser’s text repeatedly gives way to the impulse to take that armor off, the project of reforming masculinity being synonymous, in the end, with disarming it. In book 3 such moments of symbolic divestiture culminate in a series of scenarios — “perverse” from the point of view of heroic, militant masculinity — that include the poet’s identification with masochistic female suffering (Amoret), scenes of “female masculinity” (Britomart), female homoerotic friendship (Britomart and Amoret, Venus and Diana), and mother-son incest (Venus, Cupid, and Adonis). On those occasions where the male knights do not succeed in developing their vulnerable side and opening themselves to others and to the world as a self-chosen and ethical way of being, such behavior is displaced onto the monsters and villains of the poem. Duessa, for example, is presented as a figure of real suffering and genuine compassion in her response to the fates of Orgoglio and Sans Foy, and the fact that this is “[t]he real surprise” (60) and “one of the many ironies” (68) of the Legend of Holiness (to Spenser himself, I would hazard, no less than to the modern reader) suggests that we are indeed in the presence of the repressed returned if not — as Error, Archimago, Acrasia, Malecasta, and others soon follow as similarly sympathetic types — a refreshingly new take on Spenser’s poem.

The 1590 Faerie Queene remains the focus of this book but the difficulty of squaring Spenser’s recovery of a virtuous vulnerability in his poetry with his part in the violent repression of Ireland remains unanswered and calls for a follow-up. This, the conclusion assures us, will be the project of the author’s next book that promises to explore, in the Legends of Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy, the intersection between violence and justice. As this vision is said to represent the “dark underside of vulnerability” (229), so it offers the prospect of excavating the shadow of the shadow or the repressed of the repressed: a sequel that this reader eagerly anticipates.