Visionary Spenser contributes significantly to scholarship on Spenser and Renaissance uses of Plato and Longinus. Borris argues that Spenser, in The Shepheardes Calender, The Faerie Queene, and The Fowre Hymnes, centrally used Plato’s Phaedran image of the soul as a charioteer managing contrary passional steeds to reach heavenly heights, inspired by the beauty of noble ladies. Driving that aspiration is Longinian furor in Spenser’s poetics for realizing the sublime. To support his argument, which gives much coherence to Spenser’s works, Borris cites dazzling nuggets from Plato, Neoplatonists, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian critics, and Christian Platonists from Augustine to the Reformation. By finding the aspiring charioteer throughout Spenser’s work, Borris disproves Ellrodt’s view of Spenser’s limited Platonism until 1596. On the eclogues Borris might extend the implications of Spenser’s radical revision of Plato’s male-driven chariot into a stately wagon carrying a regal lady with many attendants.

The Phaedran motif exfoliates in the epic adulation of Gloriana, deeply analyzed in Borris’s final chapter, but he minimizes Jeffrey Fruen’s important essays and does not fully explain how Gloriana’s beauty is exemplified in her subtypes, notably Britomart, whose heroic androgynous beauty further unfolds in the triadic beauty of the Graces (Florimell, Belphoebe, Amoret). Borris stresses Florimell’s outward beauty, not Belphoebe’s chastity, and ignores the culminating generative love and Christlike passion of Amoret. Plato’s charioteer did not in fact find beauty in virtuous women, not until Platonism joins with praise of the Virgin Mary in the refining love of Christian mystics, grail quests, and courtly love debates. Though Borris appends Christian analogues for his argument, he always privileges the Phaedran paradigm; yet a broader Christian-Platonic hierarchic pattern, drawn not from Phaedrus but from the Republic and Timaeus, mainly informs Spenser’s epic: the triadic hierarchy of sins causing Redcrosse’s paralysis, of temptings causing Guyon’s faint, and of educative stages to regain vision in allegorical houses. The Platonic numerology of Alma’s castle combines with Aristotle’s sense-based faculty psychology; and the House of Holinesse synthesizes Platonism with rigorous Christian reform to enable heavenly vision. Borris’s focus on Platonic-Neoplatonic soaring “above the heavens” neglects Spenser’s Christian focus on the need for humbling ascesis, evident in the eclogues and crucial in the epic. Plato’s charioteer never sinks to Redcrosse’s helpless misery, nor is redeemed by a savior, nor performs penance and charitable works to attain Contemplation’s blind vision, based on faith and love. Only when the Phaedran model is chastened by Roman, medieval, and Renaissance acculturations does it contribute to Spenser’s elaborate Christian-Platonism that absorbs and transforms Homer, Virgil, and Ariosto.

The Phaedran image has limited influence on Spenser’s choice of virtues (holiness and chastity radically reform Platonism). It does not inform the epic’s hierarchic groups and allegorical sequences, nor its key doctrinal distinctions (holiness vs. temperance, chastity vs. friendship, justice vs. courtesy, Briton vs. faery, grace vs. nature) which predetermine the winners of combats and joustings. The visionary flight does play a crucial (but paradoxical and varying) role in each legend’s resolution, thus revealing the limitations of Plato’s trope. If Colin’s visionary furor on Acidale shows Courtesy’s (and the epic’s) fulfilment, why does Spenser stress the truancy of Calidore (and implicitly of Colin and Spenser)? Only in the complex growth of Christian Platonism (as in Bernard McGinn’s The Presence of God, vols. 1–6 [1991–2017]) do we see how Platonism and Neoplatonism are being transfigured in Spenser’s half-finished Reformation epic. Borris neglects much relevant work on Spenser’s Platonism, notably James Nohrnberg, (The Analogy of The Faerie Queene, 1976) and Robert Reid (“Spenserian Psychology and the Structure of Allegory in Books 1 and 2 of The Faerie Queene,” Modern Philology 79 [1982], 359–75, repr. in Renaissance Psychologies, 2017), which treats Phaedrus’s deviance from the Republic and Timaeus. Considering the importance of Borris’s book, its index is incomplete and at times confusing.

Finally, why designate Spenser’s Christianized Platonism as early modern? Spenser resists the push toward modernism’s skeptical indefinition, instead trying to stabilize belief by reforming the treasury of the past—archaic words, intricate rhyming prosody, formalist genres, elitist monarchic politics, and elaborate doctrinal allegory which in The Faerie Queene, and strikingly in Fowre Hymnes and Cantos of Mutabilitie, subordinates ancient theologies (notably Cupid and Venus) to Christian truth. Despite its limitations Visionary Spenser is necessary reading for Spenser scholars, making important inroads into the scope and meaning of Spenser’s epic.