Hi Raisa,

I definitely agree that this is a tough text to get your teeth into. Most of the time, it feels as though Spenser is either teaching an open-and-shut moral lesson or describing something in such a way that I have no idea what’s going on. I personally responded to the parallels in imagery between Una and the Virgin Mary, and how that relates to Elizabeth in terms of our discussion of portraiture, but something else that struck me was the idea of “invention” that we discussed last week. Spenser references Chaucer and Ovid fairly frequently in his style and subject matter in The Faerie Queene, so his use of that technique and how it relates to poetic authenticity at the time might be a cool thing to examine.

Hope everyone’s enjoying the snow day!