Body marks in early modern English epic: Spenser's 'Faerie Queene' and Milton's 'Paradise Lost'

As epic was considered a culturally comprehensive genre, so Spenser's Faerie Queene and Milton's Paradise Lost provide an effective locus for inquiry into literary representations of body marks in the Renaissance, and hence of the body itself. While grounded on central principles of Renaissance poetics such as delightful teaching, ut pictura poesis, and catharsis, Spenser's and Milton's graphic accounts of wounds and diverse other types of body marks show corporeality can have positive import for the soul and heroic identity, just as they are shaped in part by bodily experiences. This dissertation thus reconsiders the widespread assumption that early moderns primarily viewed the body as a subservient yet sometimes threatening container for the soul. Just as Books One and Two of The Faerie Queene address different virtues, Holiness and Temperance, they offer different perspectives upon the body's relation to heroic development. Redcross's body marks are relatively Galenic in nature, and refer to former notions of spiritual thralldom, the metaphoric body-as-prison, corporeal grotesqueries in Bakhtin's sense, the humoral body, and the bloody piercings of the Passion. On the other hand, Guyon's marked corporeality has proto-Cartesian affinities with mind-body dualism, recalls classical stoicism, and evokes comparison with European colonization of new-world natives. In Paradise Lost , the significance of marked and deformed bodies largely follows from Milton's notion of the divine image as the appropriate paradigm for rational creatures. This distinctive Miltonic emphasis on corporeality's relation to the divine image, highlighted by various descriptions of marked and deformed bodies, befits the text's exposition of the biblical story of Adam and Eve, in which creation in the divine image is central, and also accords with Milton's views on materialism, monism, mortalism, traducianism, and creation ex Deo. The dissertation's conclusion assesses The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost's presentations of marked bodies in relation to the Cartesian divide, circa 1630, an important historical marker in Western culture's history of the body. While indicating corporeality's importance to the making of poetry in the Renaissance, Spenserian and Miltonic body marks present different outlooks on the body in accord with the distinct literary programs and times of these poets.