Love’s Courtly Ethic in the Faerie Queene: From Garden to Wilderness

This book focuses on the reassertion of the value of courtly love in The Farie Queene. To this end, it offers a radical reappraisal of the Bower of Bliss, of Florimel’s career and of Amoret’s relationship with Busirane. The author argues that, in order to enhance the inadequate moral and spiritual vision of medieval courtly love, Spenser unites it with the medieval and Renaissance literary tradition of the wild man which provides a vigorous alternative to the vacuities of the contemporaneous pastoral with its lymphatic lovers.