The Animal-Human Analogy

At the 2006 International Spenser Society Conference, one of the more memorable panels was “Animal Being,” in which Jane Bellamy, Joseph Lowenstein, and Elizabeth Harvey each explored various conjunctions of literary criticism, cultural theory, and taxonomy. ¹ I think it is fair to consider this panel the originary call to arms for Spenserians to engage themselves in questions of biology, humanity, and animality. The impetus toward replacing and rethinking the human within the larger network of animal species, which flourished in Shakespeare studies and Early Modern Cultural studies in works by Karen Raber, Bruce Boehrer, Erica Fudge, Laurie Shannon, and a host of others, was conspicuously absent in Spenser studies until the watershed special issue of Spenser Studies: Spenser and “The Human.” ² And yet Spenser is much riper for these new kinds of analysis than any of his contemporaries. Simply to produce a taxonomy of creatures in Spenser would be a daunting task. And that taxonomy would raise many nigh-unanswerable questions. For example, if conceived hierarchically on a scala naturae, would Talus, the iron man of Book V of The Faerie Queene, be above or below Errour, the allegorical dragon of Book I? These kinds of questions are not fanciful or irrelevant. ³ Rather, I argue, Spenser’s poetry and its many creatures pose ethical, aesthetic, political, and interpretive challenges that Spenserians have only begun to explore.