Byung-Eun Lee, Anabaptists and the Gyant in Book Five of The Faerie Queene   pp. 93~106 ( 14 pages)

Abstract


 In Book Five, Canto ii of The Faerie Queene, there is one incident, the encounter of Artegall and the Gyant, that suggests the close relationship between Spenser and the political and religious unrest of the sixteenth century. Spenser has left no personal document that would suggest the precise historical nature of the Gyant. However, if one juxtaposes Spenser’s stated and implied beliefs in the Tudor social order with the equalitarian ideals of the leveler Anabaptists, one can note a close parallel to the juxtaposition of Artegall and his foe, the Gyant. The English and Irish political situation in the late sixteenth-century around Spenser can also make us assume the possible source for the Gyant. Thus, by indicating Spenser’s political philosophy and contrasting it with that held by the Anabaptists, and by mentioning few historical information concerning the Anabaptists in England, which critics fail to pinpoint, in this paper I wish to show that the English Anabaptists, those heirs of political discord found in Münster and the Low Countries, are the most likely historical antecedent for the Gyant. 
  
 저자 키워드  Key words
  
 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book Five, Anabaptists, Gyant, radical religious movement