The system of the intellectual virtues in Edmund Spenser's "Faerie Queene"

Nothing is more germane to The Faerie Queene than the concept of virtue, and it is this perennial subject in the field of Spenser studies that my thesis revisits. The poem's allegorical and ethical landscape appears all the richer if we bear in mind the distinction between moral and intellectual virtues that Renaissance thinkers inherited from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics , a major philosophical influence on Spenser's epic. For Aristotle, the good life is inconceivable without intellectual excellence. Book VI of The Nicomachean Ethics is devoted entirely to what for Aristotle are the five major intellectual virtues: prudence ( phronesis ), contemplative wisdom ( sophia ), rational intuition ( nous ), expertise in science ( episteme ), and skilled knowledge of art ( techne ). These virtues of the mind lead us to truth, that is, to what is right and wrong in the epistemic sphere, just as the virtues of character allow us to recognize good and bad in the moral sphere. I argue that for Spenser, too, the virtues of the mind prove indispensable to an ambitious and holistic ethical ideal--of the kind that The Faerie Queene promotes through its "gentle discipline." Each book of Spenser's epic is dominated by one praiseworthy intellectual quality, which operates in parallel with the titular moral virtue. My reading elicits from The Faerie Queene a coherent substratum of the 'goods of the mind' that adds nuance and further complexity to its system of moral virtues. In the background of my project is the revival of interest in the Aristotelian concept of virtue in contemporary philosophy. The study of intellectual virtue has given rise to a new branch within epistemology called virtue epistemology. As for moral virtue, a seemingly antiquated category in the context of the ethical paradigms ruling modernity (Kantianism and utilitarianism), it has reasserted itself in the work of such eminent virtue ethicists as Alasdair Macintyre and Martha Nussbaum. By reading the "sage and serious" Spenser, the first philosophically minded English poet, we gain insights about the nature of virtue that have as much theoretical and practical value as the insights of philosophers, both ancient and modern.