‘Perpetuall Reformation’ in Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene

This chapter offers a close reading of Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, which represents the reformation of law in terms of both its equitable correction and its administration. The Knight of Justice, Artegall, corrects regional law and governance across a number of historical allegories that most frequently allude to the sixteenth-century English efforts to colonise Ireland. Yet his methods and success are called into question not only through his defeat in combat by Radigund, but also through his rescue that is accomplished by his fiancé. As Britomart travels back through Faerieland, retracing the knight’s steps in order to liberate him from thraldom to the Amazon, we discover that the countryside has not been subdued in the wake of his reformation of justice. Britomart’s re-enactments of the knight’s battles re-present the activities of legal reform and governance as ongoing tasks requiring consistent magisterial presence and attention. This chapter appears at the beginning of the book not only for chronological reasons, but because the matter introduces a number of topics and contexts that will be developed at greater length in the studies that follow, including legal and character education, Aristotelian legal equity, artificial reason, and itinerant justice.