Mapping The Faerie Queene

The ultimate goal of our digital project mapping Spenser’s Faerie Queene is that it should be used as a digital tool to further scholarly study of this great epic of British literature, especially questions concerning the connections regarding place, imperialism, colonialism, globalization, and Early Modern Britain.

Future plans include mapping out many more locations—actual, allegorical, and speculative—that are presented or imagined in the story, and we recognize the need to add more location labels to refine our categories and to account for locations that do not fit into such a constricted categorization (for instance, passing references to actual locations that are excerpted from the history of Britain).

We also recognize that allegorical and speculative locations often cannot be mapped with any reasonable certainty; therefore, we would need some signifier(s) to demonstrate that these locations may be completely unmappable or that they may essentially be placed in several hypothetical locations that cannot be adequately mapped with any conclusiveness.

The theoretical implications of this project are vast. We continue to ask ourselves questions that lead to new lines of inquiry. For example, what are the problems associated with mapping an allegorical space? With what degree of certainty can be argue that certain places that Spenser creates in The Faerie Queene actually refer to real locations? What does it mean when Spenser includes the names of real locations in relation to his allegorical world? How can we trace the impact of imperialism through places, especially in light of actual imperialist maps? What is the relationship between place, character, and imperialism?

Due to each of our research interests, each group member had worked with The Faerie Queene in one form or another. During our preliminary conversations about the project, our discussions kept circling around to the idea of the possibilities and pitfalls of mapping an allegory. We also considered the idea of the intertwining of imperialism and mapping, especially in the case of England and Ireland. In addition to his literary writing, Spenser was an English government official who spent a great deal in Ireland. He penned a now inflammatory tract called View of the Present State of Ireland, which was one of the foundational documents of imperialist thought. It outlined a plan for the subjugation of Ireland that advocated extreme violence to exterminate the persistently rebellious elements of Irish society. Spenser’s Faerie Queene, while of a different genre and ostensibly different purpose, can be read not only as a uniquely English allegorical epic but also as the literary companion to View of the Present State of Ireland. Thus, in constructing our map, we wished to consider the relationships between place and imperialism, especially in an allegorical literary location.

Spenser's Faerie Queene is a British epic of paramount significance to the history of Britain. The knights and ladies that inhabit its pages experience perilous difficulties and arduous tasks as they traverse the broad territory of Fairyland and beyond. Considering its importance to history and to literature, we embarked on an arduous journey ourselves to attempt to map the multifarious locations wherein the events of the book take place.