Spenser and Milbank

Spenser might provide a Milbankian response to Milbank’s endorsement of homosexual sex and “threesomes.” In Book 3 of The Faerie Queene , Spenser’s heroine is Britomart, the lady knight who represents a militant chastity directed toward marital and sexual consummation rather than a fearful virginity that simply avoids sex. Britomart is descended from a Trojan, Brutus, the legendary founder of the British people. In one of her battles, she unseats Paridell, who is also of Trojan descent. Paridell is from the collateral line of Paris, and is altogether another Paris ?Eseducing Hellenore away from her husband Malbecco and causing disorder at least in Malbecco’s house. Paridell’s Trojanness is a static thing, a matter of identically repeating Paris’s original sin (to use Milbankian language). Britomart, on the contrary, is among the anscestors of Elizabeth, and thus is a link in the chain connecting Trojan virtue with Elizabethan virtue. Her Trojanness is not the identical repetition of the past sin and fall, but a non-identical repetition that leads to progress. And this progress, Spenser is at pains to show, depends upon her chastity (in the sense defined above).

If the details could be filled it, we might have a way to argue that non-identical repetition (Milbank’s Trinitarian ideal) depends on chastity, and thus on the renunciation of threesomes and homosexual sex. Apart from such chastity, cultures and persons are condemned to the static identical repetition that Milbank abhors. I have not even come close to identifying the dots here, much less connecting them, but perhaps Spenser provides the materials for a response to Milbank that works with Milbank’s own materials and concepts. Something for one better qualified than I to follow up with.