Religion

Abstract

Despite the commitment of C. S. Lewis to an essentialist view of human nature and an appreciative mode of criticism that have fallen out of favor with modern scholars, he captures many viewpoints that have prevailed in the interpretation of Edmund Spenser’s religious allegory from the beginning through the present day.’ During his career at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, this medieval and Renaissance scholar earned great renown during the middle of the twentieth century. Speaking of The Faerie Queene, he observes: Innumerable details come from the Bible, and specially from those books of the Bible which have meant much to Protestantism—the Pauline epistles and the Revelation. His anti-papal allegories strike the very note of popular, even of rustic, Protestant aversion; they can be understood and enjoyed by the modern reader (whatever his religion) only if he remembers that Roman Catholicism was in Spenser’s day simply the most potent contemporary symbol for something more primitive—the sheer Bogey, who often changes his name but never wholly retires from the popular mind.