The Optics of Prediction in The Faerie Queene: Merlin’s Reflecting Telescope

A mirror or a crystal ball? That interpretive crux arises at the heart of Book iii of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene – when Britomart discovers Merlin’s “glassy globe” and first sees Arthegall in its surface. The “looking-glasse,” that is, not only reflects Britomart but also tells the future. This essay revisits the problem of Merlin’s glass by locating it in the context of rapidly developing sixteenth-century optics, and one invention in particular: the reflecting telescope. By 1590, a range of thinkers from John Dee to Leonard Digges discovered in the reflective properties of mirrors innovative ways to understand human sight, cognition, and prediction. And it is Digges that proposes a reflecting telescope, a device that Merlin employs in Book iii. These scientific advances, in turn, inform Spenser’s references to vision and reflection throughout the poem, granting his allegory the ability both to distort sight and counter-intuitively to produce the future. Indeed, The Faerie Queene uses misrepresentation to protect its queen and to protect budding projects of nationalism. To see, for Spenser, is to change “the world it self” and to bring about its British futures.