Religion
The Faerie Queene was written during a time of religious and political controversy – the Reformation. After taking the throne following the death of her half-sister Mary, Elizabeth changed the official religion of the nation to Protestantism (“Mary” 687). The plot of book one is similar to John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, which was about the prosecution of the Protestants and how Catholic rule was unjust. (McCabe 41) Spenser includes the controversy of Elizabethan church reform within the epic. Gloriana has godly English knights destroy Catholic continental power in books one and five (Heale 8). Spenser also embodies many of his villains with “the worst of what Protestants considered a superstitious Catholic reliance on deceptive images” (McCabe 39). He ends up showing us with the epic that all religions are unclear in some way, and that although we as humans strongly desire this clarity, it is impossible (McCabe 39).
Read more about this topic: The Faerie Queene
Famous quotes containing the word religion:
“The only human beings I have thoroughly admired and respected in the world have been those who carried the load of the world with a smile, and who, in the face of anxieties that would have knocked me clean out, never showed a tremor. Such men and women end by owning us, soul and body, and our allegiance can never be shaken. We are only too glad to be owned. Religion is nothing but this.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Religion is an attempt to get an irrefragably safe investment, and this cannot be got, no matter how low the interest, which in the case of religion is about as low as it can be.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality.”
—W. Winwood Reade (1838–1875)