Britomart’s Meteorological Wound

• Rebecca Totaro

When on 6 April 1580 an earthquake struck in the Straits of Dover, it set off a wave of literal tremors as well as reactions to it. In literature in particular, earthquakes and their meteorological siblings, volcanoes, proliferated and served flexibly as markers for memory, signs of jest, representations of amplified physical power, indicators of bodyshaking trauma, and didactic statements on the Lucretian nature of things. In this paper, Totaro examines several meteorologically charged characters in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene of 1590, including Spenser’s Knight of Chastity, Britomart, whose lovewound throbs with the forces that drive change in the sublunary system. In creating these characters, Spenser uniquely draws from three competing paradigms for the interpretation of meteorological phenomena, and he challenges readers, now as then, to re-imagine the relationship between all generative bodies and Earth, as well as between early modern meteorology and physiology. In the years since S. K. Heninger concluded that “Spenser’s individual images drawn from meteorology fail to evoke any profound response,” scholars of the early modern body, wonders, and the environment have broadened our perspective on the cosmology of the period, making especially fruitful a return to Spenser’s appropriation of meteorological theories.