Famine in Faeryland

Emaciated bodies appear frequently in Edmund Spenser’s Legend of Holiness, and indeed throughout The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596). This tendency is typically attributed to the poet’s traumatic memories of the Munster famine, vividly memorialized in A View of the Present State of Ireland (ca. 1598). This article instead proposes reading Spenser’s allegorical engagement with emaciation in the context of broader textual traditions that interpreted starvation as a providential punishment, a just outcome of legitimate warfare, and a laudable expression of piety. Both within and beyond the poem world, I argue, starvation—often violently enforced—is presented as both consequence of and remedy for moral inadequacy. Crucially, the alleged pedagogic and spiritual value of starvation determines not only how human affliction and suffering are interpreted and responded to but also how violence itself is understood and justified.