SOURCE: Imbrie, Ann E. “‘Playing Legerdemaine with the Scripture’: Parodic Sermons in The Faerie Queene.” English Literary Renaissance 17, no. 2 (spring 1987): 142-55.

In the following essay, Imbrie discusses the characters in The Faerie Queene who emerge as “false preachers,” delivering sermons that represent perversions of biblical rhetoric.

Guyon's encounter with Mammon, however we judge his success in that episode from Book II of The Faerie Queene, has long been recognized as a parody of Christ's temptation in the wilderness. Patrick Cullen has discovered a similar scriptural parody in Redcrosse's encounter with Despayre in Book I.¹ In fact, the poet frequently shows an evil character producing holy witness with a smiling cheek in order to dissuade a hero from moral action. It is not surprising that Spenser's villains will often pervert rhetorical power, even language itself, to evil ends; this is a fairly standard means of characterizing evil, familiar to...