The Politics of Hunting: An Aristotelian Reading of Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti 67

Abstract

This chapter rereads Sonnet 67 of Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti alongside the conflation of hunting and war in Aristotle’s Politics, and with reference to George Gascoigne’s Noble Arte of Venerie. The longed-for ‘grace’ that the beloved finally bestows upon the lover in Sonnet 67 has been read in Protestant theological and secular erotic terms via a long tradition of literary hunting metaphors. This chapter contributes an Aristotelian version of grace to the interpretive context. It begins by outlining Aristotle’s political conception of hunting as a natural mode of acquisition that depends upon and thus produces a gradated rather than binary difference between animal and human life. This forms the basis of a political order and a conception of justice that also defines and orders Aristotelian categories of human: the child, the slave, and the woman. I argue that the onto-political reordering effected by the hunt is tracked by the poem’s shift from simile to metaphor. My reading, tracing the relationship between political theory and literary figuration in Sonnet 67, opens out the political-philosophical relevance of a poem that is more obviously domestic, erotic, and theological in significance.