starre unseene
Of other worldes he happily should heare?
He wonder would much more: yet such to some appeare.
(Book 2, proem, 1–3)16
The three-part “world” (composed of Europe, Africa, and Asia) that was thought, since ancient times, to make up all of earthly creation was now to be understood as part of a much larger global system. “Hardy enterprize” (i.e., risky investment in long-distance voyages) was bringing new worlds into connection with the old ones.
In Book One, Spenser had already compared his epic narrative to “the long voyage” (1.12.42) of a sailing vessel, but the proem of Book Two goes further, asserting an analogy between imaginative capacity, textual production, and global “enterprize” or exploration. Fairyland, claims the poet, is just as real, perhaps more real, than “other worldes” that are yet “unknowne.” In part, this is merely a playful, ironic defense of fiction, poetry, and the imaginative arts; but these cantos also refer to a very real spatial, textual, and epistemological reorientation for Spenser and his audience when the poet declares, “of the world least part to us is red.” By the time that Spenser wrote, English readers had been exposed to an outpouring of new discovery narratives describing previously “unknowne” lands, peoples, cultures, customs, commodities, and artifacts. As this data proliferated, it was redistributed and reorganized in various textual forms. These texts circulated and came to inform English culture, and they brought into play a powerful new outlook or worldview. The experience of coming to know what had until that time been unknown about the rest of the world was suddenly an open-ended, continual process, one that could not rely on received wisdom. Spenser’s proem refers to the manner in which the new data was consumed as it was conveyed by the textual and oral reports from those who were engaged in the global enterprise of “discovering” and measuring those things “Which to late age were never mentioned.” Spenser suggests that any stubborn reliance on the old Eurocentrism, based in the geographic writings of the ancients (those of the “wisest ages”), is akin to the over-skeptical folly of a “witlesse” bumpkin who will only believe in “that which he hath seene.”
The proem’s allusions to Peru, the Amazon, Virginia, and to “unknowne” lands also indicate Spenser’s very real linkages to the global network through the patronage system of his day. Sir Walter Raleigh, who was himself the author of globally oriented texts like The Discoverie of Guiana (1595) and The History of the World (1614), was a participant in the “endlesse work” of discovery, and Spenser’s close ties to him are apparent in many sections of The Faerie Queene. As Spenser traveled together with Raleigh between Ireland and London in 1589, he may have read portions of The Faerie Queene to Raleigh, and the famous “Letter of the Authours” addressed to Raleigh indicates the role of Spenser’s patron as a privileged reader of the epic. As a member of Raleigh’s circle of clients, and as the leader of a short-lived colonial settlement in Munster, where Spenser’s holdings were adjacent to land owned by Raleigh, Spenser was a coparticipant with Raleigh in the English effort to strengthen and expand their colonies in Ireland.17 William Oram has argued that Spenser’s involvement in Ireland was an experience of alienation: “To give up England while continuing to write her national epic must have involved some sacrifice and uncertainty” (342), writes Oram. And while there is certainly some truth to this, we might also say that Spenser and his epic were not limited to the English national imagination, but were shaped in part by a global, transnational vision. Stephen Greenblatt’s chapter on Book Two of The Faerie Queene in Renaissance Self-Fashioning makes clear the connection between Guyon’s quest, the Irish colonial context, and the experience of English Protestant settlers in the New World. Spenser also participated together with Raleigh in the Elizabethan Protestant resistance to Roman Catholic power, and in his epic that struggle is represented as a global conflict. In fact, Raleigh himself once declared, “Whosoever commands the sea, commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself” (cited in Sherman, 93).
In Book Two of The Faerie Queene, Guyon and Arthur confront three exotic foes – Mammon, Maleager, and Acrasia – who represent the temptations and obstacles faced by those who venture forth from England to seek wealth and land amongst the “salvage” or “paynim” peoples of the earth. Temperance must contend, not only with domestic enticements, but also with the erotic pleasures offered by other cultures, and with the temptation of gold, the holy grail sought by Raleigh in Guiana and found by the Spanish in Peru. Guyon’s greatest trial takes place in canto seven of Book Two, in the Cave of Mammon. Here, Guyon is not tested in knightly combat, and though Mammon is annoyed that Guyon resists temptation, Mammon himself is never in danger of defeat. It is this episode that I would like to examine more closely, in terms of the global system and the circulation of precious metal that was such an important force in the worldwide movement of goods and peoples in the early modern period. Though silver was actually more important to the global economy, the more valuable metal, gold, was the most sought after by the British adventurers and privateers of Spenser’s day, and gold serves as a fetishized symbol for the extractive riches obtained and controlled by Spain through her overseas empire.
According to Raleigh’s Discoverie of Guiana, Spanish gold “indaungereth and disturbeth all the nations of Europe, it purchaseth intelligence, creepeth into Councels, and setteth bound loyalty at libertie, in the greatest Monarchies of Europe” (127–128). Despite this warning, in the same text Raleigh promises, “Where there is store of gold, it is in effect nedeles to remember other commodities for trade” (195). Gold becomes a primal signifier, the sign both of a profound corruption that knows no boundaries and, at the same time, of a transcendent value that can buy anything and everything. Just as Spain is both the enemy and the model for ambitious English subjects like Raleigh, gold is both the source of a tyrannical, ungodly power and the ultimate object of noble aspiration. For the virtuous adventurer, gold is merely a means to an end, and to love or desire gold for its own sake is sinful and irrational; however, the overdetermined significance of gold in the Cave of Mammon also refers to the allure of profit that motivates all sorts of economic activity.
In his discussion of “Guyon, Mammon’s Cave, and the New World Treasure,” David T. Read looks at the Cave of Mammon episode through the lens of English perspectives on the Spanish “hunger of gold.” Read points to early modern accounts of Spanish exploration that described the conquistadors’ desire for gold as something that “prevents or frustrates men from fulfilling their bodily needs” (217). Read quotes from Peter Martyr’s narrative, translated in Hakluyt: “the hunger of golde, dyd noo lesse encorage owr men to adventure these perels and labours then dyd the possessynge of the landes” (cited in Read 1990, 217). According to Read, this perverse tendency to put a figurative “hunger” for gold before the natural hunger of the body accounts for the physical collapse experienced by Guyon after he escapes the cave. At the same time, Read suggests that “the Cave of Mammon allegorizes the emerging mercantilism of a financially pressed nobility in the late sixteenth century” (Read, 212n). The colonial forms of conquest and overlordship that would presumably establish new limbs of the Spanish body politic were supplemented, and sometimes superseded, by a desire for gold that made the possession of land, and the expropriation of native labor, a mere means to control a supply of precious metal.
But to limit our analysis of gold in the Cave of Mammon to the events of Raleigh’s journey to Guiana, or to a contextualizing exploration of early modern goldmining, refining, and coining practices, would be to follow the pattern of the “new materialism” that focuses on the object without placing that object in relation to larger historical processes or ideological movements.18 Instead, I want to point out that Mammon’s power is described by Spenser in global terms. Mammon’s attempts to seduce Guyon suggest that gold is associated, not only with the Spanish colonies, but with a global phenomenon, one which includes both Spain and England in its worldwide scope.
The figure of Mammon signified, in early modern economic and religious discourse, as a devil and a false god, and as a personification of wealth and worldly goods. The name “Mammon” is a Syriac word that appears twice in the Gospel, in Luke 16:9–13 and Matthew 6:24. The latter passage from the Sermon