SOURCE: Stump, Donald. “A Slow Return to Eden: Spenser on Women's Rule.” English Literary Renaissance 29, no. 3 (autumn 1999): 401-21.

In the following essay, Stump focuses on Spenser's perception of Queen Elizabeth I as a female monarch of the English Reformation in Books III and V of The Faerie Queene.

A number of recent studies of gender roles in The Faerie Queene have concentrated on what has been perceived as the narrator's shifting (and perhaps shifty) appraisal of women's ability to rule.¹ In Book III, the narrator suggests that women are at least as capable as men in “warlike armes,” the “artes,” and “pollicy”—which are, of course, the principal areas in which a Renaissance prince was expected to excel (ii.2).² In Book V, however, the narrator seems to retreat from the conclusion implicit in his earlier claims, saying of women that “wise Nature did them strongly bynd, / T'obay the...