Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) The faerie queen...together with the other works of England’s arch-poët, Edm. Spenser: collected into one volume, and carefully corrected. (London: Matthew Lownes, 1611). Rouse.7.14, sig. H2^v

Alexander Gil championed the introduction of vernacular literature into the curriculum, so that English poets such as Edmund Spenser appeared in Milton’s schoolroom alongside Virgil, Homer, Thucydides and other Classical authors. Spenser’s Faerie Queene—an allegorical epic written in the tradition of chivalric romance—is arguably the single English poem that had the greatest influence on Paradise Lost. In a passage of Areopagitica (1644), Milton hails Spenser’s powers as a moral ‘teacher’, with reference to the passage from the Faerie Queene II.vii displayed here:

"Which was the reason why our sage and serious poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas, describing true temperance under the person of Guion, brings him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon, and the bower of earthly bliss, that he might see and know, and yet abstain.

Famously, Milton’s description of Sin’s grotesque deformations in Book II of Paradise Lost owes much to Errour, the female monster killed by the Redcrosse knight at the opening of Spenser’s poem.

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