Spenser’s The Faerie Queene has long been read as a key text in ‘Atlantic history’ and the emerging models of planter colonialism in Ireland and America. This essay argues that Spenser’s work also deserves a place in the larger context of global Renaissance studies: that is, a recent critical paradigm foregrounding the global changes to political, cultural and socioeconomic formations, often (and certainly in the case of Europe) brought about by various forms of transcultural exchange or encounter.
One new angle of approach to Spenser – and indeed to early modern epic – that foregrounds these global horizons presents itself in the recently rediscovered poetic treatise of William Scott. Strongly influenced by Sidneyan poetics (as indeed Spenser was), Scott’s accomplished treatise, The Modell of Poesy (1599), is distinguished by its attention to recent literary writing. But we find some surprises, not so much in the judgements as in the associations and connections made between key early modern texts. In Scott’s treatment of epic, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene keeps company with More’s Utopia, Sidney’s Arcadia, Daniel’s Civil Wars, and, perhaps most surprisingly, Warner’s Albions England, along with the usual suspects – Homer, Xenophon, Virgil, Heliodorus, Ariosto and Tasso. It is a salient reminder of the diverse forms and more exploratory meanings of heroic writing for early modern English readers. This essay takes what is perhaps the most obvious outlier in Scott’s tally, Warner’s Albions England (1586–1612) to argue for strong connections between the 1596 edition of this work and Spenser’s epic, connections that shed new light on the global rather than primarily national horizons of early modern English epic for its first readers.