Rachel,

I agree completely with your response to Kacie on the seeming contradiction in Spenser’s depiction of women. I think it is more a question of how Spenser is fashioning an image of Queen Elizabeth as a monarch than how he views women in general. The poem is a glorification of the monarch and the nation, and Spenser advocates for extreme chastity because it was a glorified virtue at the time. Of course, this appears to contradict our own modern concept of feminism, but I think we must read the text with an appreciation for its historical context. I am not sure if we should consider Spenser an early feminist; I am more interested in the ways Spenser projects an image of the queen as “an ideal object on which to practice their art of praise…thereby gaining the authority which they had lacked” (4), as Hamilton discusses.