Abstract

Petrarch imagined that the hopeless but pure love of a woman could lead a man to heaven. In sixteenth-century England Edmund Spenser wrote poetry in the petrarchan tradition while heightening its dilemmas, flirting with a very different kind of feminine image. Dorothy Stephens shows that this flirtation emerges only in conditional language and situations, creating an eroticism which the narrator nevertheless insists is illusory. She goes on to look at responses to Spenser's eroticism among male and female writers in the seventeenth century.