The Emblematics of Edmund Spenser's House of Holiness

Publisher： American Mathematical Society

ISSN： 2167-8529

Source： Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, Vol.25, Iss.1, 2010-06, pp. : 21-51

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Abstract

For some time now, literary critics have pointed to the emblematic style of Edmund Spenser's House of Holiness, which appears in Canto x of the first book of The Faerie Queene. Emblems of faith, hope, and charity seem to step out of an early modern emblem book and into the House of Holiness, where the Redcrosse Knight is cast as a reader whose emblematic literacy transforms images of faith, hope, and charity into images of his own spiritual life named Fidelia, Speranza, and Charissa. We know much about emblematic conventions, but there are precious few glimpses into emblematic reading practices that dramatize how a visual image and its complementary verbal image coalesce to affect the reader's disposition. The House of Holiness offers us this glimpse. In this essay, I will suggest that the House is a scene of reading, where the emblematic enters into the temporal process of narration, and, in this process, the static, depicted visual details of the emblematic come alive and enliven the affective being of their readers.