“Spencerus isthic conditur”: Kenelm Digby’s Transcription of William Alabaster

Abstract

Kenelm Digby, perhaps the most signifcant early critic of The Faerie Queene, copied a four-line Latin epigram by William Alabaster onto the fyleaf of his own copy of Spenser’s work. In this article I place his decision to do so in context, and suggest that Digby’s choice of these verses may have been informed by his uncertainty surrounding his own confessional identity. Alabaster had converted to Catholicism in 1597, before rejoining the English church in 1611: Digby, born into a disgraced Catholic family, sought to understand his own religious allegiance in the late 1620s, and his reading of Spenser and broader engagement with Renaissance romance was one dimension of this attempt. I therefore suggest that a surprising strand of the aferlife of Spenser’s poem was located amidst the complications of English Catholic conversion and reconversion.

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