ABSTRACT
The chivalric and pastoral dynamics imply differing beliefs about social organization, moral principles, and the past. Chivalry takes its origin in society. Its idea ofhistory is dynastie, sequential, political; its idea of social organization is hierarchical. Pastoral, on the other hand, originates in biological processes, and its history describes only the chan ging of the seasons, the cyde of birth, death and renewal. Its social organization is egalitarian; its moral principles imitate natural processes. Spenser's Book I implies that human beings are caught by their very nature, their very finiteness, in a chivalric mode: life is aseries of educating tests, and it is emphatically end-directed. Beginning with Book III, however, Spenser emphasizes with increasing insistence that human beings are also biologieal, and that while the individual's life begins and ends, the life of the species goes on in endless cyde. We might say of Book III that it is dominated not by a single allegorical movement - the movement of the quest - but by two movements. In addition to the quest, there is a second movement or theme - that of generation, cydical, pastoral.
