Wary Boldness: Courtesy and Critical Aesthetics in The Faerie Queene

In Book VI of The Faerie Queene, Spenser figures courtesy as a uniquely self-divided virtue. Alternating between benign and malign manifestations with such ease and rapidity that these seeming opposites become indistinguishable from one another, Spenser’s courtesy is a means of utopian progress and dystopian catastrophe at one and the same time. Embodied as much by the Blatant Beast as the courteous knight who seeks to contain it, the virtue functions less as an instrument of ideological motivation than as an index of the way that historical crisis obscures the difference between culture and its barbarous Other. Book VI ultimately thematizes and trains readers not in a politics per se, but in the critical agency that Spenser describes as “wary boldness,” a proto-political faculty governed by the tension between aesthetic experience and social praxis. The essay concludes by arguing for the value of Adornian theory in thinking through this tension, as it exists in The Faerie Queene, early modern literature, and contemporary critical practice.