Comparing episodes from The Faerie Queene with episodes from the works that inspired Spenser, in particular excerpts from Ariosto’s and Tasso’s works, is a productive way to draw attention to how racialization travels and mutates across national traditions.

Take, for example, Duessa’s relationship to her literary predecessors, Alcina and Armida, in The Faerie Queene. Duessa, falsifying her identity under the name Fidessa, is the “faire companion” of the “Sarazin” Sans Foy, whose name means without faith. Before discussing Duessa, however, we need to examine her “Sarazin” companion. Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh has argued that the term denotes Muslims who lie about their racial lineage and claim to be descended from Abraham’s wife Sarah: “Every time the label is pronounced, Muslims are presumed guilty of fabricated genealogy, of co-opting Christian history, of misrepresenting themselves and their faith, of manipulating those around them.”

Spenser’s name for this Muslim character, Sans Foy, effectively binds faithlessness to Muslims: Islam is not a faith in the poem’s estimation. This Muslim knight, like all Muslims in the general estimation of early modern Christians, cannot be trusted because he belongs to a race that falsifies their genealogical origins. The same is also true for his brothers, Sans Joy and Sans Loy. In the Sans brothers we see many of the same racist tropes applied to Muslims to this day.

Catfishing whiteness as the ultimate evil

But back to Duessa. The story of Duessa turning Fraudubio into a tree closely imitates Alcina turning Astolfo into a tree in Orlando Furioso. In OF, Astolfo tells the knight Ruggiero (Rogero in John Harington’s translation, quoted below):

[Alcina] and Morgana were in incest gotten.

And as their first beginning was of sinne,
So is their life vngodly and defamed,
Of law or iustice passing not a pinne.

Alcina and her sister Morgana are characterized through one of the logics of race: their character is predetermined by the circumstances of their birth. But the real problem is that Alcina appears beautiful and desirable—she seems to be white!

Although Astolfo warns Ruggiero about Alcina, Ruggiero is unable to resist her beauty in canto 7. There we get a seven-stanza blazon, in which Alcina bears all the conventions of white, feminine beauty: in stanza 11 alone she is described as having long blond hair “As might with wire of beaten gold,” as having “lovely cheeks” that “With roses and with lilies painted are,” and has having a “forehead faire and full of seemely cheare, / As smooth as polish Ivoried doth appeare.”  

But both Ariosto and Spenser will make it clear that Alcina and Duessa only seem to be beautiful white women. Both poems strip the sorceress of whiteness and allow the heroes and us as readers to see who they really are.

In OF, a magic ring given by the good sorceress Melissa reveals Alcina’s true nature:

Her face was wan, a leane and writheld skin,
Her stature scant three horseloaues did exceed:
Her haire was gray of hue, and very thin,
Her teeth were gone, her gums serv'd in their steed,
No space was there between her nose and chin,
Her noisome breath contagion would breed,
In fine, of her it might have well bene said,
In Nestors youth she was a pretie maid.

Alcina is primarily revealed to be disgusting because she is old. But the reference to “painting,” cosmetics, also draws attention to the fact that here beauty and whiteness were artificial.

Spenser goes further to make Duessa an object of disgust. Una, who really is white, reveals Duessa’s true nature:

Her craftie head was altogether bald,
  And as in hate of honorable eld,
  Was ouergrowne with scurfe and filthy scald;
  Her teeth out of her rotten gummes were feld,
  And her sowre breath abhominably smeld;
  Her dried dugs, like bladders lacking wind,
  Hong downe, and filthy matter from them weld;
  Her wrizled skin as rough, as maple rind,
So scabby was, that would haue loathd all womankind.

Her neather parts, the shame of all her kind,
  My chaster Muse for shame doth blush to write;
  But at her rompe she growing had behind
  A foxes taile, with dong all fowly dight;
  And eke her feete most monstrous were in sight;
  For one of them was like an Eagles claw,
  With griping talaunts armd to greedy fight,
  The other like a Beares vneuen paw:
More vgly shape yet neuer liuing creature saw.

Duessa is described in more disgusting detail, and Spenser’s narrator draws the reader’s attention to Duessa’s “neather parts,” reveling that Duessa is a monstrous animal, not just an old woman. Like Alcina, her whiteness was only superficial. Both Ariosto and Spenser render pagan and Muslim women as incapable of being suitable sexual partners; they are old and non-human and thus unable to be bearers of white, Christian children.

It is important to also draw students’ attention to the fact that Spenser didn’t have to write the story this way. He could have followed Tasso’s example, in which the blond Muslim sorceress, Armida, is converted to Christianity (she is described at length in canto 4, stanzas 24-32). Tasso takes a different approach—in his epic, it seems that Armida becomes a Christian because she is beautiful and white—whiteness is a necessary precondition for conversion.

Nevertheless, what is true in all these epics is that white skin is almost always assigned to Christians or characters who will become Christians.

Lechery, the allegory

More episodes ripe for comparison are Ariosto’s “Ethiopian sodomite” and Spenser’s allegorical character, Lechery. In canto 43 OF, a black man offers a white Italian man, Anselmo a sumptuous palace in exchange for sex:

[Anselmo] sees a Gipsen standing at the doore,
All blab-lipt, beetle browd, and bottle nozed,
Most greasie, nastie, his apparell poore,
His other parts, as Painters are disposed,
To giue to Esop; such a Blackamore
Could not be seene elsewhere, as he supposed,
So vile avilage, and so bad a grace,
To make eu'n Paradise alothsome place.

(Note: Harington’s translation refers to this character as a “gipsen” [Egyptian] and a “Blackamore,” while Ariosto calls him “uno Etiopo.”) This Black man is a figure that is supposed to inspire the reader’s disgust, and this feeling is supposed to be intensified upon imagining Anselmo having sex with him.  

In Book 1, canto 4 of FQ, Duessa leads Redcrosse to Lucifera’s House of Pride. There, Redcross sees the seven deadly sins. Following Gluttony is Lechery:

And next to him rode lustfull Lechery,
   Upon a bearded Goat, whose rugged haire,
   And whally eyes (the signe of gelosy,)
   Was like the person selfe, whom he did beare:
   Who rough, and blacke, and filthy did appeare,
   Unseemely man to please faireLadies eye;
   Yet he of Ladies oft was loved deare,
   When fairer faces were bid standen by:
O who does know the bent of womens fantasy?

Whether or not Spenser is directly recalling this moment from Ariosto, comparing the two characters allows us to discuss further how the feeling of disgust sticks to specific bodies—pagan and Muslim women, and now to Black men. Additionally, these Black male characters are also defined in relation to sexual proclivities that are supposed to rejected by the white Christian reader.

Race and sexuality are linked in Spenser. In the production of allegory, the allegory sutures lechery to a Black man. A Black body is the most suitable body for the English reader to understand lechery.

Malignant influence

It is key for students to see the way Spenser’s influences are taken into The Faerie Queene, and how racialization is developed through this process of either intentional reimagining or cryptomnesia. By reading Spenser’s poem alongside excerpts of Orlando Furioso and Jerusalem Delivered, students can begin to trace the network of influence and the adaptation of thought in the signifying of racial difference across national and cultural divisions.  

Resources

Britton, D. "From the Knight’s Tale to The Two Noble Kinsmen: Rethinking Race, Class and Whiteness in Romance.” Postmedieval 6(2015): 56-78.

---. “Teaching Spenser’s Darkness.” In Teaching Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide, edited by Matthieu Chapman and Anna Wainwright, 67-85. Tempe, AZ: ACMRS Press, 2023.

Rajabzadeh, Shokoofeh. “The Depoliticized Saracen and Muslim Erasure.” Literature Compass 16.9-10 (2019): 1-8.

Sanchez, Melissa E. “‘To Giue Faire Colour’: Sexuality, Courtesy, and Witness in The Faerie Queene.” Spenser Studies 35(2021): 285-90.