San Antonio College Library

"Literary scholars have often felt that in Books III and IV of the of the Faerie Queene Spenser became confused, indifferent, or careless; that in Books I and II he was he was in control of the structure but that in Books III and IV he was not. This intensive study, which J. Lyndon Shanley has called 'the most satisfying interpretation of the Faerie Queene, books three and four, I have read, and in one of the best of any part of the Faerie Queene,"...

The Allegory of Love is a landmark study of a powerful and influential medieval conception. C. S. Lewis explores the sentiment called 'courtly love' and the allegorical method within which it developed in literature and thought, from its first flowering in eleventh-century Languedoc through to its transformation and gradual demise at the end of the sixteenth century. Lewis devotes particular attention to the major poems The Romance of the Rose and...

"Scholar invoked such formulas as "mere flattery" or "fulsome rhetoric" to dismiss the encomiastic literature or earlier periods as a subject for serious investigation. Recent work on the funeral elegy, the court masque, and the royal entry, however, recognizes the pervasive role of official praise in Renaissance culture. In the case of The Faerie Queene, its encomiastic intention is well known by remains uninvestigated. This study shows how the greatest...

Publisher's description: Linking The Faerie Queene with early modern conduct manuals, romances, dedicatory epistles, and devotional literature, McManus examines the poem's depiction of women's interpretive strategies and argues that female readers were expected to exercise considerable autonomy as they endorsed, adapted, or resisted the texts that sought to fashion them as "chaste, silent and obedient."