Astraea Returned to Heaven

Abstract

Throughout, this book concerns itself with the implications that shifting ideas of combat have for sixteenth-century conceptions of individual and communal selfhood. This striking image of a headless female body bathed in blood not only recalls the emblem of the headless female in Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, it initiates Artegall’s judicial exploits in Book Five of The Faerie Queene, suggesting the important place of bodily damage in the judicial process as Artegall conceives it. The image functions, almost as an early modern emblem might, by offering a way of reading the physical reality of the body.² Many critics, uncomfortable with the cruelty and violence implicit in the retributive judicial zeal presented here, have seen Artegall’s practice of justice in the first several cantos of Book Five as deeply flawed and canto four as presenting the true beginning of Artegall’s judicial exploits.³ However, the emblem of the headless female has a history not only in medieval romance, as evidenced in Malory’s Morte, but in depictions of the goddess Astraea as a symbol of her dispassionate judgment.

To whom as they approched, they espied A sorie sight, as euer seene with eye;

An headlesse Ladie lying him beside,

In her owne blood all wallow’d wofully That her gay clothes did in discolour die.

Much was he moued at that ruefull sight;

And flam’d with zeale of vengeance inwardly,

He askt, who had that Dame so fouly dight;

Or whether his owne hand, or whether other wight?

—Edmund Spenser from “The Fifth Booke of the Faerie Qveene”¹