20150521.0712

Owing to the fact that my dissertation director is Jennifer Vaught, I spend some time at each International Congress on Medieval Studies I attend with the kind and intelligent people who treat Spenser and Sidney at the conference. This year was no different, and so on Friday of the conference, I attended a panel on Spenser's Faerie Queene, one titled The Matter of Faerieland.

After opening remarks, the first paper, Caroline Pirri's "Virtue as Virtuality in The Faerie Queene, Book III," focused on the character of Britomart from Book III, arguing that she functions as a mirror for other characters and thus as a microcosm of the poem as a whole--or that is what I took from it. I also note the comment that "Chastity is a foreclosure of bodily knowledge," a concept that seems fit to consider in future work.

The next paper was Stephanie Hunt's "Pastoral Allegory and the Politics of Nature in The Faerie Queene." Among her discussion was the idea that politics are constructed as reflecting natural order--something still in common use--which becomes problematic not only for the expected reasons--taking something as "natural" means it is unalterably "the way things are," which precludes helpful changes--but also because nature itself is ultimately unknowable. It requires mediation to be understood, but mediation is itself an imposition of artifice and thus an abrogation of nature. If politics reflect nature (and here the comments are mine rather than what I understood from Hunt's), and nature is itself inscrutable, then politics are also impenetrably complex. Whether that is true or not, I leave to others (perhaps a future me) to untangle.

The final paper in the panel was Liza Blake's "Golding, Spenser, and the Physics of The Faerie Queene." I admit that my background is not such that I was able to follow the paper as well as it deserved, although I was able to take from it the idea that Spenser's poem, insofar as it suggests or promotes understandings of the relationships among things in nature and the meanings uniting those things, presents a physics of at least its own world. Poetry, as I understood Blake to say, is a means to approach understandings of the essential forms and their shaping, in which it connects to physics as commonly understood: the study of the essential forces that shape reality.

I did attend other panels during the conference, not only those for the Tales after Tolkien Society (which I am still in the process of writing up, as there are other concerns I wish to address in that work, and freelance writing has resumed). My comments on them will continue into tomorrow, at least, although I do have to consider the difference between today's and yesterday's. Today's follow a more common pattern for conference summaries, I think, giving takeaway notes for papers presented; yesterday's gloss far more, and they do so in part as a response to one of the contested comments made in one of the panels. Said comment remarks on conference work as ephemeral and unfinished; that discussion needs more untangling, more "unpacking" in academic parlance. It is why I am trying to be clear that what I report today is my understanding; I may have gotten things wrong or, more generously, filtered material through my biases more fully than I have understood. It is a complicated thing; as I note, it needs more thinking-through.