The bear myth in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene

The animals in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene have been skillfully treated as allegories, but these creatures also deserve a look from a mythological perspective. Perhaps the most important animal to begin with is the bear, which French historian Michel Pastoureau recently has explored in his monumental, The Bear: History of a Fallen King. Using many of Pastoureau’s insights (and criticizing others), we can make room for an analysis of The Faerie Queene as a text in which pre-modern and even ‘prehistorical’ images of bears meet with Early Modern views of the noble creature, demonstrating that, despite Spenser’s allegorical tendencies, the bears in The Faerie Queene still speak.