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This essay analyzes a sequence of descriptions of art objects near the end of the 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene. In the first room of the House of Busirane, Britomart encounters a tapestry that, as the romance's longest ekphrasis, provides an immersive experience of art. The second room, however, treats art differently: No longer animated by the viewer's imaginative involvement, these objects appear to be mere objects, antiquarian refuse from a dead past. I argue that this progression from immersion to detachment parallels a larger historical development in the period toward epistemological objectivity. By embodying imaginative forms in antiquarian objects, Spenser distances his readers from what he perceives as the imagination's dangers. But he is ambivalent about the resulting detachment, as an analysis of his final metaphor of the Roman hermaphrodite statue shows. In the end, his highly imaginative poetry depends on the very same interfusion of subject and object that his poetry also seeks to reject.
FOR FRANCIS BACON, the imagination is a wayward tendency, like original sin, that must be controlled-not by grace, but by the .X. application of technique and method. The problem with the imagination is that it creates grotesque mental amalgams by "mingling" a person's internal nature with the external things he observes in the world.2 In his 1605 Advancement of Learning, Bacon compares credulous and superstitious man to the mythic Ixion, who brought forth the race of centaurs and other chimeras by accidentally copulating with a cloud: "So whosoever shall entertain high and vaporous imaginations, instead of a laborious and sober inquiry of truth, shall beget hopes and beliefs of strange and impossible shapes."3 Bacon's language may be saturated with the same imaginative waters from which he claims to be leading his readers;4 however, despite such implicit complexity, much of today's scholarship presents itself as continuing to employ the subject-object separation that his work most overtly promotes. In regard to literary-historical scholarship, for example, Margreta de Grazia probes in a recent article the shared working understanding of anachronism, defining it as "a violation of the basic principle of epistemology: the viewing subject must remain distinct from the viewed object. When one collapses into the other, knowledge cannot take place."5 Learning is no longer supposed to entail entering...