Religion
The Faerie Queene was written during a time of religious and political controversy – the Reformation. After taking the throne following the death of her half-sister Mary, Elizabeth changed the official religion of the nation to Protestantism (“Mary” 687). The plot of book one is similar to John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, which was about the persecution of the Protestants and how Catholic rule was unjust. (McCabe 41) Spenser includes the controversy of Elizabethan church reform within the epic. Gloriana has godly English knights destroy Catholic continental power in books one and five (Heale 8). Spenser also embodies many of his villains with “the worst of what Protestants considered a superstitious Catholic reliance on deceptive images” (McCabe 39). He ends up showing us with the epic that all religions are unclear in some way, and that although we as humans strongly desire this clarity, it is impossible (McCabe 39).
Read more about this topic: Phaon (fiction)
Famous quotes containing the word religion:
“I read ... an article by a highly educated man wherein he told with what conscientious pains he had brought up all his children to be skeptical of everything, never to believe anything in life or religion or their own feelings without submitting it to many rational doubts, to have a persistent, thoroughly skeptical, doubting attitude toward everything.... I think he might as well have taken them out in the backyard and killed them with an ax.”
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)