I have also been thinking about the note that Woolf considered Spenser an early feminist. Not only does Spenser explicitly promote chastity and demonize female sexuality, he uses female adjectives to describe ill-willed creatures in the poem. In the first canto of Book I, Error is described as “Halfe like a serpent horribly displaide/ But th’ other halfe did womans shape retain,/ Most lothsom, filthie, foule, and full of vile disdaine.” (1.1.14.124-126). Duessa, in the next canto, is “a cruell witch” and “a false sorceresse,/ That many errant knights hath brought to wretchedness” (1.2.33.289;34.305-6). These descriptions could be read as providing women with more agency than we have seen in other contemporary poetry. However, it seems that Spenser could be merely adding a third archetype to the ones allowed for women: virgin, whore, and monster.