Wondering at Ruins

This chapter explores Spenser’s ambivalence towards the violence of reformation, and its ruination, not just of medieval monasteries, but the lives and legends of saints in monastic manuscripts. It offers a comparative analysis of two texts—William Vallans’s A Tale of Two Swannes (1590) and Spenser’s Ruines of Time (1591)—both written in the aftermath of the 1588 Spanish armada and with England’s war with Spain in the Low Countries ongoing. The chapter shows how both poets use a chorographical focus on the ruins of Roman Verulamium as a frame for their patriotic praise of Anglo-British heroism across history. Yet while both use historical examples of heroism to counter contemporary invasion anxieties in the early 1590s, both poems also reveal British history itself as a battleground between competing catholic and protestant versions of the past. These are tensions foregrounded by each poet’s respective approach to the life of St Alban, Verulamium’s most famous citizen. Vallans follows the medieval, monastic accounts of Alban’s life that are dismissed by John Foxe as ‘Abbeylike additions’ in his post-dissolution, protestant rewriting of Alban’s life in Actes and monuments, and this echoes Vallans’s interest in monastic history and monastic ruins elsewhere in his poem. If St Alban is the site of controversy in A Tale, he is a figure conspicuously absent from Spenser’s poem. The chapter argues for Alban’s shadowy presence in The Ruines of Time nonetheless, pointing to Spenser’s hitherto unacknowledged indebtedness to Gildas’s sixth-century De excidio Britonum and other ‘Abbeylike’ accounts of Alban.