“Tied Up in Chains of Adamant”: Recovering Race in Tasso’s Armida Before, and After, Acrasia

Abstract

Spenser’s use of Italian sources in The Faerie Queene has been widely explored by scholars. But how does race work in those texts themselves? In this essay, I consider the Bower of Bliss and its literary antecedents—Spenser’s sources provide a rich opportunity to explore race and its interplay with gender and religion. My focus lies on the character of Acrasia’s foremother, the Muslim enchantress Armida, and the dramatic change to her fate between the two versions of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581) and the Gerusalemme conquistata (1593). I argue that a consideration of how Tasso violently excludes Armida from the second half of the Conquistata, which was published after Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, provides a new understanding of the particular racialization of Tasso’s enchantress. Across substantial national and religious boundaries, Spenser’s and Tasso’s choices demonstrate a common racial logic in play in 1590s Europe, one that allows neither Armida nor Acrasia to survive their poems.