Throughout the twentieth century, critics of the poet Edmund Spenser wrestled with the question of the presence of Plato as well as Platonic thought in Spenser’s works. Having recently established the profound presence of Platonism in Spenser via Marsilio Ficino and other sources, the field of Spenser studies is now open to a treatment of exactly what kind of Platonism is present in Spenser. Drawing from the work done by researchers in the field of magic and Platonism, in this article I hope to demonstrate the presence of Platonic daemons in Spenser’s Faerie Queene who are found under the name of “sprites” or “sprights” in the poem. An examination of daemons in The Faerie Queene will elucidate some questions on the role of Merlin in the poem as well as Spenser’s own self fashioning as a poet-magus.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Russell, J., (2025), "Spenser’s Sprites: Platonic Daemons in The Faerie Queene", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Russell, Jesse. "Spenser’s Sprites: Platonic Daemons in The Faerie Queene." Renaissance and Reformation 43 (1): 2020. 105-134. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v43i1.34081. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.