Jon A. Quitslund. Spenser's Supreme Fiction: Platonic Natural Philosophy and the Faerie Queene.

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. xiv + 374 pp. index. bibl. $70. ISBN: 0-8020-3505-1.

Elegant and clear (if occasionally misty) in style, this book caps many years of scholarly reading and writing (to which the huge bibliography attests), years which resulted in Quitslund's justly famous Spenser articles, for example that in JWCI on Amoretti 8 and that in Silent But for the Word on patronage. Its centerpiece is the long, learned, and sensitive treatment of the Garden-of-Adonis episode, which occupies chapters 6 and 7. These chapters go somewhere: they address and usually solve real problems, such as Venus' domination of Adonis.

Aside from chapters 6 and 7, the book has no overriding thesis that is contestable, no throughline argument, except the importance of Platonism. At the beginning, Quitslund salutes every theoretical flag, a paragraph apiece, as if mocking the notorious requirement by his exaggerated deference. What follows is a combination: (1) useful treatments of Platonic and other sources including a nuanced assessment of the proportion and relation of Platonism to Christianity in Spenser; (2) a gallimaufry of sensitive explications of selected passages linked by Spenser's repetition of a word or phrase such as "night" and "day," explications some of which could stand alone as brief essays. Oddly, this book on Platonic natural philosophy mentions neither the Timaeic arithmological stanza (II.ix.22) nor the surrounding House of Alma. Like Nohrnberg's Analogy of The Faerie Queene, like the Faerie Queene (hereafter FQ) itself, the book rambles and circles back to topics. This approach is made reader-friendly by the "Index of Names and Places in The Faerie Queene."

The FQ, like Platonic thought, is permeated by hierarchy. Quitslund rescues Spenser, however, from the conservatism that this implies by pointing out two mitigating tendencies; the equal importance of a leveling paradigm, concordia discors, and the emphasis on lower ontological levels such as human passions and bodies. The higher levels and beings are often ironically lowered; for example, the numinous Una comes embarrassingly close to being raped, and her rescuers are comical (I.vi), illustrating Spenser's "own ambivalence toward the conjunction of flesh and spirit" (133-42).

Quitslund's interpretations represent a judicious synthesis of selected old interpretations with new insights (his own, those of recent critics, and those he has derived from theorists), thus ushering Spenser gently into our times. He utilizes Ellrodt's groundbreaking study (1960) while dismissing its strict focus on medieval, Timaeic Platonism. His treatment of Spenser's Garden of Adonis uses Freud's ideas about mourning (225). Spenser is driven by loss (219) and offers social remedies. In Stanza 45 Amyntas' transformation into a flower seems merely sentimental, yet it is central. Amyntas and his flower the Amaranth symbolize Sir Philip Sidney, the mourning for whom by fellow poets Spenser evokes in Stanza 45 and whose memory was preserved by Sidney's own family in annual ceremonies paralleling Nature's cycles (223-26).

For the connection with Sidney, Quitslund utilizes Abraham Fraunce's The Third Part of the Countess of Pembroke's Yuychurch: Entituled Amintas Dale. Elsewhere, too, Quitslund has brought to bear on the FQ other new or underutilized primary sources, for example, Bruno's Spaccio, Batman vppon Bartholome, Christoforo Landino's two works on the Aeneid, and the Symposium's translators, imitators, and commentators--Ficino, Leone Ebreo, and Louis le Roy.

The last three authors wrote in the dialoghi d'amore tradition, which meant they were not only erudite but fashionable; hence it is credible that Spenser used them. Another channel of such "esoteric humanism" to Spenser's intellectual community was Cornelius Agrippa's fashionable De occulta philosophia, transmitting almost verbatim chunks of Ficinian arcana. Armed with Quitslund's introductions, even non-Spenserians can learn to view through these lenses their chosen authors or at least gain a new assessment of the culture of the Renaissance middlebrow.

CAROL V. KASKE

Cornell University