The Faerie Queene

Edmund Spenser set out to write an epic that would do for English what Virgil did for Rome — and built it around knights who each embody a single virtue: Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, Courtesy. The Redcrosse Knight's fight against the dragon alone has outlived nearly everything else written in Elizabethan England, a foundational quest narrative wrapped in dense allegory and ...