"Equitie to measure": The Perils of Imperial Imitation in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene

Abstract

Despite the anti-Spanish thrust of Book Five of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, the manner in which the principle of equity is applied in the book resembles the Spanish Dominican use of natural law to weigh the ethics of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. In Book Five, the champions Artegall and Britomart face a situation analogous to the Spanish conquest when they confront the Amazon, Radigund, who rules over a city that the narrator characterizes as unnatural. Artegall fails to exercise equity correctly and the result of his failure is his capture and imprisonment by Radigund as well as his eventual liberation by the female knight, Britomart. Britomart's intervention identifies equity as a feminine principle, presumably in order to identify the exercise of equity with Britomart's real-life counterpart, Queen Elizabeth. In the Radigund episode at the center of Book Five, Spenser's poem is caught in a contradiction between his adherence to the principle of " feminized" equity in foreign contexts and his insistence on basic principles of natural law, which were responsible for naturalizing patriarchal gender relations. As a result, one important and available (mis)reading of the book is that the narrative justifies the (Spanish) conquest of England itself and its own "Amazon" queen, Elizabeth, in the interest of restoring a regime based on traditional conceptions of natural law. In this respect, the logic that Book Five follows is similar to that championed by exiled English Catholics, who allied themselves with the Spanish crown against Elizabeth.

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