Abstract
This chapter argues that Spenser’s conceptualisation of the human is formed through both animality and race. It focuses on Redcrosse’s major opponents in Book I of The Faerie Queene (1590), the dragonlike creature Errour, and the actual dragon he must slay to assume his predestined identity as St George. The first section explores how animality and race have been discussed together in early modern studies so far, before locating this discussion in Critical Race Theory and Animal Studies. The chapter next outlines key early modern discursive contexts for dragons: the Bible; popular culture; mythology; and natural history. It then close reads Spenser’s characterisation of Errour via animality and race, before tracing how her characterisation echoes in that of the dragon. The chapter encourages early modern scholarship to examine how the period’s construction of the human is formed not by animality and race operating independently, but in tandem.
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Notes
- 1.
The terms ‘animal’, ‘non-human animal’, and ‘beast’ are obviously loaded. I try to avoid using them synonymously, reserving ‘bestial’ and its variants to express animal-like qualities positioned negatively; I also use ‘animal’ to mean ‘non-human creatures’ generally.
- 2.
I became aware of important work on breeding and race in the Spanish empire by Mackenzie Cooley (2022) too late to include it in this discussion.
- 3.
See Block Friedman for a list of the most commonly-mentioned peoples (2002, 9–19). There is other scholarship on monstrosity but the singular appeal of Davies’ is her insistence on the historically-situated link to colonialism and race co-forming the ontological category of the human.
- 4.
See also Stenner (2023), which extends this discussion to William Baldwin.
- 5.
For discussion of the controversy around Spiegel’s book, see Boisseron (2018, ix–xxvi).
- 6.
For a discussion of Spenser’s engagement of Aristotelian thought vis-à-vis slavery and the animal, see Chap. 4.
- 7.
- 8.
See also Boisseron’s discussion of Afro-Pessimism for its analysis of ‘Blackness’ as an ‘unprecedented phenomenon [...] like no other in our modern history’ (2018, xvi).
- 9.
See Barrett (2013) for a complementary discussion of Spenser’s engagement with natural history.
- 10.
In his role as sun god Apollo also features in early modern accounts of racial difference informed by climactic theory (Hall 1995, 62–3).
- 11.
For an extended archaeology of the dragon’s premodern significance see Goth (2015, 13–27, 47–67).
- 12.
- 13.
For a detailed overview, see Goth (2015, 86–97).
- 14.
Black ink was in fact used by seventeenth-century actors to create blackface (Hall 1997, 121).
- 15.
Egypt had several intertwined associations: with the biblical land of the Jews’ enslavement; revered as the seat of wisdom in the Corpus Hermeticum, that had been recently translated (c.1471) into Latin by Ficino; and as a space of witchcraft and Dionysian abandon expressive of racial alterity. See Brooks-Davies (1997), Al Mostafa and Baker (2017).
- 16.
For an overview of readings of the dragon, see Goth (2015, 30).
- 17.
As Hall (1995, 62–122) teaches, this dynamic plays out at length in the English sonnet cycle and other lyric poetry. Spenser’s own Amoretti (1595) opens with a description of the beloved’s beauty that is strikingly similar to Una’s in its blinding whiteness; she has ‘lily hands’ (Spenser 1999, 1.1), is ‘fayrest proud’ (2.9), and her ‘huge brightnesse’ and ‘celestiall hew’ render the speaker ‘dazed’ and ‘amazed’ (3.5-8).
- 18.
- 19.
See for example McCabe (2005).
- 20.
For a complementary reading of this passage which addresses ‘cultural erasure’ and the justification of colonial violence, see Case (2022, 319-ff).
- 21.
For the ontology of giants, see Davies (2016, 148–162).
- 22.
As recounted in chronicles such as Holinshed’s (from 1587), Dioclesian’s numerous daughters all murdered their husbands. In punishment, they were banished to sea, washing up in Albion and mating with its diabolic inhabitants. See Holinshed (1807, chapter 1.3).
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Stenner, R. (2024). Errour’s Repercussions: Dragons, Race, and Animality in The Faerie Queene. In: Stenner, R., Shinn, A. (eds) Edmund Spenser and Animal Life . Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42641-4_5
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