Redcrosse: Accidental Nobility
According to the old wife in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, gentilesse comes from God alone. Ancestry and birth have no bearing on an individual’s nobility. The first book of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene focuses on an oafish man called Redcrosse who slowly matures into a chivalrous knight. Though Redcrosse does not fit exactly into the old wife’s mold of a gentleman, he certainly possesses many qualities of nobility by the end of Book One of The Faerie Queene. When Redcrosse first appears, he is presented as a common man, or as Spenser calls him in his letter to Raleigh, a “clownish person” (626). Since the armor Una lets him try on is representative of the armor Saint Paul describes as the armor of a Christian man, it is only natural to assume that if it does indeed fit, then God willed that Redcrosse be some sort of holy emissary. The armor does in fact fit perfectly; theref
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Saint Paul, Saint George, Pride Lucifera, King Arthur, Despair Redcrosse, Faerie Queene, Queene Redcrosse, Tree Life, God Redcrosse, Gods Evidence, day battle, house pride, faerie queene, nobility book,
Approximate Word count = 624
Approximate Pages = 2 (250 words per page double spaced)
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