(H)eroic Disarmament: Spenser’s Unarmed Cupid, Platonized Heroism, and <i>The Faerie Queene</i>’s Poetics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In The Faerie Queene’s first proem, which introduces the whole text as well as Book I, Spenser specifically invokes the creative assistance of unarmed Cupid, who also appears in the poem thereafter. Spenserians have much debated whether his disarmament means anything, and whether Platonism has any relevance. Yet previous studies have overlooked formerly well-known literary, iconographical, and hermeneutic precedents that show he thus signifies the heavenly love of virtue or amor virtutis in a Platonizing way. And they have missed the poet’s association of Cupid in this particular aspect with the Ideas. Whereas the most recent biography of Spenser calls his explicitly Christian Platonist Fowre Hymnes “anomalous” in his canon, his representation of unarmed Cupid in The Faerie Queene, we find, anticipates various features of them. As Plato had derived “hero” from “Eros” so that heroism became born of love, and attributed high accomplishments in valor, virtue, and intellect to this amorous inspiration that he especially defines in the Phaedrus and Symposium, so this poet broadly refashions heroic form by making it (h)eroic and relatively unwarlike. The Faerie Queene’s motif of the unarmed Cupid imagistically focuses these principles of Spenser’s poetics, and this study’s findings demonstrate Platonism’s importance, currently underappreciated, to the poet’s representations of love and heroism and to his whole creative enterprise.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".