Edmund Spenser is a vocal spokesman for the colonization of Ireland. In A View of the Present State of Ireland, he provides one of the most sustained imperialist articulations in Elizabethan England. And in Book V of The Faerie Queene, he promulgates a vision of justice that is necessary for containing individual and social dissent, as well as for consolidating monarchical authority. Spenser wants a similar form of relentless justice applied to controlling the recalcitrant Irish, but discovers that his implacable imperialist policy stands in direct opposition to Queen Elizabeth’s own.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Lim, W. S., (2025), "Figuring Justice: Imperial Ideology and the Discourse of Colonialism in Book V of The Faerie Queene and A View of the Present State of Ireland", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Lim, Walter S. H. "Figuring Justice: Imperial Ideology and the Discourse of Colonialism in Book V of The Faerie Queene and A View of the Present State of Ireland." Renaissance and Reformation 31 (1): 2010. 45-70. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v31i1.11566. 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/.