Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Publisher

Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Source Publication

Parergon

Source ISSN

0313-6221

Original Item ID

DOI: 10.1353/pgn.2024.a935333

Abstract

This article focuses on the treatment of occasion through the even-numbered books of 'The Faerie Queene', a pattern which constitutes part of the poem's incorporation of logic into moral thinking. Spenser's 'pleasing Analysis' of virtue ethics has two senses of 'Methode', the analytic and the cryptic. Whereas for the humans logic is integrated into how they exercise virtue and advance their own and our understanding of it, the virtues patronised by faerie knights, Temperance, Friendship, and Courtesy, while they use logic, are surreptitiously revealed to depend on circular reasoning. For these more tautological virtues, the cryptical method allows for inversion and redundancy geared both to exalt virtue and to gloss over conceptual limitations in received traditions of virtue ethics. Occasion marks a specific means to observe this hidden circularity.

Comments

Accepted version. Parergon, Vol. 41, No. 1 (2024). DOI. © 2024 Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Inc.). Used with permission

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