Translatio Materiae: Spenser’s Poetics of Matter

This article argues that sixteenth-century humanist depictions of Rome’s decay, together with paradigms of translatio imperii et studii, shape Edmund Spenser’s poetics of matter. The article identifies a new translatio in Spenser’s corpus, translatio materiae—matter’s movement or change—born from Spenser’s contact with and Complaints (1591) translation of Joachim du Bellay’s sonnet sequence, Les Antiquitez de Rome (1553). Where earlier humanists represent the recovery and reincorporation of Rome’s material remains as a metaphor for carrying forward antique power and artistry, Spenser transforms this image of material translatio into a law governing depicted matter’s movement and change in his Faerie Queene (1590/96). Translatio materiae runs through Spenser’s corpus as represented matter’s resurrection from states of decay into material afterlives as narrative object or poetic device. I examine this phenomenon in key heroic episodes of Faerie Queene Book One, episodes which I treat as exemplary of matter’s preservation, proliferation, and translatio as compositional strategies in the poem’s narrative and structure. Translatio materiae’s use in the poem thus points to a Spenserian theory of imitation that resists the teleology of prior translatio paradigms and instead understands Renaissance imitation to exhibit all the waywardness of matter.