Chapter 3 - How England Became an Island: The Faerie Queene

Summary

Chapter 3 engages with literary criticism’s argument that English national imagining became increasingly spatialised under Elizabeth Tudor. Critics argue that cartography and chorography introduced a new spatial awareness into English national consciousness. This criticism, which ignores Scotland, misrecognises as merely ‘national’ the imperial connotations of ‘British’ in the sixteenth century. The chapter shows that sixteenth-century chorographic British antiquarianism is shot through with both nostalgia and imperial ambition: ancient place-names and local legends fill the idea of England with the immanent presence of the British past and the promise of a pan-insular, imperial future. John Dee’s claims for English sea sovereignty over the Arctic and the Americas depended on claims to Scotland. Chapter 2 shows how Spenser’s The Faerie Queene conjures the vision of an Anglo-British imperial island in which Scotland becomes inconceivable. Spenser fuses river poetry, chorography and classical poetry with these texts on naval power, maritime law and English sea-sovereignty to shape the love of Florimell and Marinell as an allegory of Chastity as key to English insular empire.