Amoret`s Sacred Suffering: The Protestant Modification of Courtly Love in Spenser`s The Faerie Queene

Abstract

MORE than sixty years ago, C. S. Lewis ascribed Amoret`s suffering to the conventions of courtly love, presenting her as simply love-begotten by heaven, raised to its natural perfection in the Garden and to its civil and spiritual perfections in the Temple, wrongly separated from marriage by the ideals of courtly gallantry, and at last restored to it by Chastity-as Spenser conceives chastity. [...] Spenser here presents an ideal Protestant wife who suffers for truth and virtue against a courtly culture where Catholic ideas about marriage and sex still linger.