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Earth of Flesh, Flesh of Earth: Mother Earth in the Faerie Queene

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Walter M. Kendrick
Walter M. Kendrick*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

Mutabilitie's claim to sovereignty over gods and men alike, as she lays it before Jove in Book VII of the Faerie Queene, is supported first of all by a genealogical argument:

I am a daughter, by the mothers side,

Of her that is Grand-mother magnifide

Of all the Gods, great Earth, great Chaos child….

(VII.VI.26)

As a ‘Titanesse,’ Mutabilitie is older by one generation than any inhabitant of Olympus. Her first assault on Jove's dominion is based on the simple equation of priority in time with priority to power: because she came first, she deserves first place. Of all her arguments, however, this turns out to be the weakest, and Jove disposes of it handily.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , Winter 1974 , pp. 533 - 548
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1974

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References

1 The text of the Faerie Queene used throughout is that edited by J. C. Smith (Oxford, 1909). The text of the Harvey Letter is that printed in Spenser's Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt (London, 1912).

2 Night herself is an ambiguous figure, who is not without her beneficial aspect. She appears in two forms before Nature's tribunal, both as the fearsome hag riding ‘with equall pase’ beside bright Day (vn.vii.44), and, in the following stanza, as ‘timely Night,' virgin daughter of Jove, whom he has stationed with her sister Hours as porters at heaven's gate. However terrible Night may be, she is bound, as she complains to Duessa, by the ‘chayne of strong necessitee’ which makes her give way before Jove's favored ‘sonnes of Day’ (I.V.25). Night is made beneficial by the same intelligent ordering which refutes the claims of Mutabilitie: evil beings, like those sired on the helpless earth, are wanton, while in the process of ordered change even Night becomes the servant of Nature's benevolent will.

3 Agricola, Georgius, De Re Metallica (Basel, 1561 Google Scholar; facsimile rpt. Rome, 1959), p. 4. Trans, as De Re Metallica by Herbert Clark Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover (London, 1912; rpt. New York, 1950), pp. 6-7.

4 Agricola, p. 8. Hoover, p. 12.

5 Loc. cit.

6 Athanasius Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus (1678), excerpted and translated in Kirtley F. Mather and Mason, Shirley L., A Source Book in Geology 1400-1900(Cambridge, 1970)Google Scholar, p. 18.

7 Translated and quoted in Cornford, Francis MacDonald, Plato's Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato (1937; rpt. New York, n.d.), p. 330 Google Scholar.