Last week, we stood at the threshold of Edmund Spenser’s Cantos of Mutability, where the great poet turns from the virtues he has spent a lifetime shaping — holiness, justice, courtesy — and asks a deeper, more unsettling question. What happens to virtue, to order, even to goodness itself, in a world where everything changes? This week, before we go any further, it helps to know exactly where we are — and where Spenser is taking us.

Edmund Spenser’s Book V of The Faerie Queene is the most severe, controversial, and unsettling book in the entire poem. Here, the ruling virtue is Justice, embodied in the knight Artegal, and guided—some would say driven—by the iron enforcer Talus, a relentless man of metal who knows neither pity nor pause.