"Reading Salvation: Protestant Hermeneutics and Book I of The Faerie Queene"

Join us on Tuesday, September 13th at 5pm in IASH Conference Room LN 1106 for our first Workshop Lecture Series with Guest Speaker Stephanie Bahr, Assistant Professor of Literature, Hamilton College. "Reading Salvation: Protestant Hermeneutics and Book I of The Faerie Queene"
Although it had widespread geo-political effects, at its heart the Reformation hinged on reading. Conflict over how to interpret the Bible divided Protestants from Catholics, and seemingly abstract distinctions between literal and allegorical senses held the very real threat of torture, death, and damnation. Yet the force exerted by these theological hermeneutics cannot be limited to explicitly scriptural contexts or the early sixteenth century. This talk will argue that Book I of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene grapples with the often conflicting demands of William Tyndale's theoretical, spiritual, and practical Biblical hermeneutics. Though many Protestants (including Tyndale) rejected allegory, poetry, and romance, Spenser appropriates all three to transform the inward, illegible process of reading-as-salvation into an externally legible pedagogical narrative. Yet this narrative is populated by demonic doubles and corrupt textual variants, rife with torture, murder, and rape that reflect the paradoxes and interpretive violence of the Reformation.

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