Edmund Spenser's Stripping of the Altars: The Altar and Catholic Liturgy in The Faerie Queene

ABSTRACT In his Faerie Queene , Edmund Spenser presents a sympathetic view of what broadly could be called Catholic liturgical piety, especially in his depictions of altars. In The Faerie Queene , Spenser is indeed averse to some of the pomp and circumstance associated with late Medieval and Early Modern liturgy that would be readily identifiable to Protestants as ‘Roman Catholic’ or ‘papist’. However, his condemnation of certain elements of Catholic liturgical piety is not a condemnation of traditional liturgical piety as such. Rather, it is a condemnation of those forms of liturgy practiced by those who are not part of one true English Church and who set themselves up as religious and political enemies of English Christianity.