Ms. Rose Cheung’s capstone project is an admirable attempt by a diligent student to come to terms with English Renaissance (specifically Protestant) conceptions of the nature of ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ and ‘truth and falsehood.’ As Ms. Cheung points out, these concepts were particularly difficult for sixteenth-century Protestants to articulate since, according to the Protestant theory of ‘double predestination’ (not accepted by Catholics or even all Protestants), the ‘reprobate’ are chosen by God before birth and therefore not defined by sin. Moreover, the Protestant approach to human ‘psychology’ meant that all people, including the ‘elect,’ are defined by sinfulness, further reducing the gap between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ people. Thus the Protestants were placed in a position where they were utterly convinced of the infinite difference between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (as seen by the distinction between God and Satan) at the same time as they were largely unable to distinguish them in practice.

These are the conditions that Ms. Cheung articulates as characteristic of Protestants in the late sixteenth century. Ms. Cheung sensibly focuses her efforts on one particular text — the first book of Edmund Spenser’s challenging epic, The Faerie Queene — in order to show how these premises function in Spenser’s narrative of the Red Cross Knight. This is a figure, as Ms. Cheung explains, who believes himself to be living in a ‘medieval’ universe of knights and ladies, dragons and monsters, where good and evil are more easily distinguished. Yet the ‘allegorical’ mode of medieval literature, as Spenser conceives it, is inadequate to provide Redcrosse with meaningful learning experiences. He kills monsters, such as “Error,” but continues to make mistakes. At every stage, Ms. Cheung articulates the tremendous challenges faced by people, such as Redcrosse, who strive to be ‘ethical’ in a Protestant world. They are simply incapable of fighting the lies and deceptions of evil people, who are far more cunning than they are.

While, at times, Ms. Cheung’s analysis reiterates some older critical commonplaces about ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (about, for instance, the need for divine inspiration to distinguish the two), by approaching the issue by the means of ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood,’ she opens up more room for discussion of these topics. Perhaps Ms. Cheung’s most complex idea is that truth, for Spenser and other Protestants, cannot be discerned except by contrast to falsehood. This makes truth and falsehood two parts of the same whole and gives ‘falsehood’ value in forming that whole. Ms. Cheung also provides careful, detailed analysis of how the ethical norms of both ‘good’ and ‘evil’ characters are practically indistinguishable in this section of Spenser’s epic.

Ms. Cheung proceeds with her capstone project with the same diligence that she approaches all her scholarly work. There are relevant digressions into numerous other texts, including Hamlet and Paradise Lost, both of which Ms. Cheung has studied in her other coursework. Ms. Cheung’s ability to integrate such material is additional testimony to her ‘whole person’ development and her developing knowledge of early modern Western culture.

This capstone project explores two opposite yet interrelated concepts in Christianity: truth and falsehood. Since the Bible, the struggles between the two forces and their interactions with humanity have been heavily featured in literature. Renaissance literature, influenced by the Reformation, saw the relationship between truth and falsehood growing more complicated, with the elect mingling with falsehoods and exhibiting sinful behaviour as a reprobate would. In Book I of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, truth and falsehood are forces that both strongly influence the main character Redcrosse, who must suffer from his wrong choices and learn moral lessons from his mistakes. The discussion in this project is divided into three sections. The first part examines the subtlety of evil, which disguises itself and co-exists alongside goodness. The second part explains the gullibility of people, including the elect, in the face of falsehood due to their weaknesses and sinfulness. Nevertheless, as shown in the third part, one may be saved by turning their encounters with falsehoods into lessons of scruple and letting their desire for God’s grace grow. I shall illustrate that in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book I, even though humans may be deceived and suffer from falsehoods because of their spiritual weaknesses, the suffering may be providential in providing an elect the necessary knowledge to embrace truth during a passive process of election, as demonstrated in Redcrosse, the knight of holiness.

I thank the English Department for my fruitful years of English literature education. I had the pleasure to study masterpieces from the Greco-Roman period to the contemporary world, an opportunity which has enabled me to better understand and appreciate the sublimity of human thought. The capstone project allowed me to combine two of my personal interests: theology and literature, both of which I am interested in because of their immense influence on our perception and the way we live life.

I would like to show my greatest gratitude to Professor Jason Gleckman, whose lectures on Renaissance literature and Christian theology first introduced me to the subject and prompted me to conduct further research. As a supervisor, Professor Gleckman had been very helpful and patient when providing feedback on my work and answering the many questions that I had, and without him the project would not have been satisfactorily completed.