Description
Book SynopsisSpenser’s ethics offers a novel account of Edmund Spenser as a moral theorist, situating his ethics at the nexus of moral philosophy’s profound transformation in the early modern era, and the English colonisation of Ireland in the turbulent 1580’s and 90’s. It revises a scholarly narrative describing Spenser’s ethical thinking as derivative, nostalgic, or inconsistent with one that contends him to be one of early modern England’s most original and incisive moral theorists, placing
The Faerie Queene at the centre of the contested discipline of moral philosophy as it engaged the social, political, and intellectual upheavals driving classical virtue ethics’ unravelling at the threshold of early modernity.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Emptying the virtuous middle in Elizabethan Ireland
1. Milton’s Spenser: An alternative virtue for a fallen world
2. Purposeful lives: Romance narrative and the generation of empires
3. Magnificence: Fashioning the imperial commonwealth
4. The metaphysics of moral being: Time, change, and flourishing in the Gardens of Adonis
5. Civility and government: Virtuous discipline in the mutable world
6. Immoderation and necessity: Spenser’s Machiavelli
Coda
References
Index
