Jeffrey B. Griswold

Peer Reviewed Articles

 



“Human Vulnerability and Natural Slavery in The Faerie Queene .” Exemplaria 34.1 (2022): 66-86.

This article traces Aristotelian ideas about natural slavery through Book VI of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene . By putting the Salvage Man episode in conversation with Louis Le Roy’s commentary on the Politics , I demonstrate that the poem naturalizes the enslavement of extra-European peoples. This reading reconsiders analysis of the Salvage Man as a figure of savage assimilation. Rather than become civil himself, the Salvage Man is shown to be congenitally predisposed to serving others who are physiologically more vulnerable and in need of his labor. I argue that Spenser’s depictions of these physically weak characters racialize the need to be served by others. Vulnerability is here a racial category used to naturalize the enslavement of bodies imagined to be stronger, harder, and less than human in their resilience. The article ends by rereading the Salvage Nation episode in light of the Salvage Man’s representation of natural slavery, showing that these two encounters align human vulnerability and racial whiteness. Taken together, these episodes suggest that to be human is to be feeble, White, and in need of enslaved bodies.

 

“Homo Homini Lupus: Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and the Vicissitudes of a Political Adage.” Studies in Philology 119.1 (2022): 170-190.

This article contextualizes John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi within early modern usage of the adage “homo homini lupus” in the period’s political philosophy. Webster draws on sixteenth-century use of the phrase in the work of Scottish and French resistance thinkers to depict tyranny, but then extends its meaning through Ferdinand’s lycanthropy. The Duchess of Malfi anticipates representations of human nature typical of seventeenth-century contract theory but is skeptical of political solutions to human brutality. The play exploits the human negative exceptionalist logic that is implicit within “homo homini lupus” to create a deeply pessimistic depiction of human nature and the future of politics.



By contextualizing the trope of the "unaccommodated man" within Aristotelian notions of insufficiency, this article demonstrates that King Lear theorizes a communitarian politics, rather than one founded in sovereign authority. For late sixteen-century thinkers such as Richard Hooker, Pierre La Primaudaye, and Robert Persons, the vulnerability of the human body provided a material account of the political animal. Our physical weakness requires the accommodation of other people. Our physiology binds us to political bodies through material insufficiency. King Lear engages this discourse, asking whether humans exist primarily as individuals or are mutually constituted. That is, can we live without society?


This essay argues that Edmund Spenser juxtaposes Florimell and the false Florimell in The Faerie Queene to think about how the latter’s autonomy illuminates the limitations of the human political subject. Although we might expect the automaton to exhibit less agency than her human archetype, the false Florimell has more control over her sexual life. Spenser uses the automaton to interrogate the metaphor of sexual consent as political consent, showing the ill-fit between the vehicle and the tenor in this key trope of political philosophy.



This article complicates scholarship on Macbeth that understands political attachment in terms of an autonomous subject and attributes Macbeth’s demise to an over-susceptibility to natural or supernatural forces. By putting early modern accounts of the humoral constitution of the night air in conversation with modern theories of apostrophe, I argue that the Macbeths’ experiences of night theorize political action as inseparable from the nonhuman forces in the play. Shakespeare reworks his source material to explore the borders of the human, imagining a more complex relationship between treasonous violence and the darkness that enshrouds Scotland.


This article examines The Faerie Queene’s use of erotic subjection as a political metaphor for theorizing the relation between conquest and consent. In the Radigund episode of Book V, Spenser explores the gender dynamics of this trope, as the subjected body is male and the monarch, female. These scenes act as a powerful counter-narrative to the poem’s earlier representations of erotic subjection by showing that external obedience cannot be equated with consent. Radigund forces Artegall to wear women’s clothing and to do women’s work, but this submission constitutes nothing more than slavery. The narrative blends political domination with sexual conquest to demonstrate that compliance is not loyalty and violence cannot elicit love.
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