The Affordances of Healing Spaces in Book III of <i>The Faerie Queene</i>

This essay focuses on the spaces of healing in Book III, cantos ii and iii, an approach not yet undertaken in criticism, to argue that Glauce’s and Merlin’s respective ministrations toward the ailing Britomart take the forms that they do and have the effects that they do—on Britomart, on meaning, on the reader—because they take place where they do. Attention to the ecological features of the healing spaces, their “affordances” and “taskscapes,” enables us to recognize the ways in which the care extended to Britomart by each healer is both efficacious and insufficient—and why. In turn, this recognition helps us to understand why healing is always partial in The Faerie Queene.