1. Georges Duby, France in the Middle Ages (1987; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 56. [BACK]

2. The rise of Arthurian romance coincided with the Norman hegemony in Great Britain. Geoffrey of Monmouth, who essentially invented King Arthur so that the Normans could claim to be restoring old ways that the intervening Angles and Saxons had usurped, wrote of fortresses in his Historia Regum Britanniae (ca. 1135). Wace, however, substituted castles when he translated Geoffrey's Latin into French verse a generation later, as well as highlighting some evil customs ( Roman de Brut , in Wace and Layamon, Arthurian Chronicles [New York: Dutton, 1976], 3, 7, 10, 15, etc.) [BACK]

3. N. J. G. Pounds, The Medieval Castle in England and Wales: A Social and Political History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 96-101. [BACK]

4. Pounds, The Medieval Castle , 256. See also Michael W. Thompson, The Decline of the Castle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). [BACK]

5. Pounds, The Medieval Castle , 249. [BACK]

6. J. R. Lander, Conflict and Stability in Fifteenth-Century England (London: Hutchinson, 1969), 164. [BACK]

7. Pounds, The Medieval Castle , 297. [BACK]

8. Michael W. Thompson notes, "For three centuries the castle had been a grim but serviceable structure with unpleasant associations. In the late four-

teenth century it seemed to reveal how nice it could look" ( The Rise of the Castle [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 178). [BACK]

9. David Aers, Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing, 1360-1430 (New York: Routledge, 1988), 155. [BACK]

10. Ibid., 161. [BACK]

11. Compare Sir Thomas Elyot's The Castel of Helth (1539), cited in A. C. Hamilton, ed., Spenser: The Faerie Queene , 124. [BACK]

12. Hamilton, ed., Spenser: The Faerie Queene , 742. [BACK]

13. Eneas: A Twelfth-Century French Romance , trans. John A. Yunck (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 198. [BACK]

14. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 391. [BACK]

15. Coleridge is cited in the notes to FQ 4.5 in Spenser, Works: A Variorum Edition , vol. 5, 198. [BACK]

16. Phillip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poesy , ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1965), 101, 158 n. 8. See also the Oxford English Dictionary , s.v. "castle," 12. [BACK]

17. Richard II 3.1 (Bristol), 3.2 (Barkloughly), 3.3 (Flint), 3.2.210 ("pine away"), 3.3.148 ("gorgeous palace"). Sidney gives a "gorgeous palace'' as an example of something that must be modeled or pictured, not just declared, to make known its "inward conceit" for a "judicial comprehending" ( Defense 107). Cf. The Tempest 4.1.152. The word palace derived from Palatinum, one of the hills of Rome, and in sixteenth-century English usage almost exclusively denoted a royal palace in a town, as Joseph Rykwert notes ("The Palace and the City," Times Literary Supplement , 13 September 1991, 17). [BACK]

18. Northrop Frye observes that "when Northumberland reports Bolingbroke's wish for Richard to come down and parley with him in the 'base court' (the basse cour or lower courtyard of Flint Castle)," the symbolism of the whole operation flashes at once through Richard's mind: "Base court, where kings grow base" ( Richard II 3.3.180) ( On Shakespeare [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986], 65). [BACK]

19. See 2 Henry IV IV, Epilogue, 30-32. [BACK]

20. John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe , 8 vols. (New York: AMS, 1965), 3:709, 712. [BACK]

21. As David Riggs notes, 1 Henry VI is "an extended comparatio between English chivalry, as it is represented by Talbot, Bedford, and Salisbury, and the

mock-heroic pretensions of Joan la Pucelle and the French peers. . . . Although Talbot does fight to maintain his personal honor, that honor is systematically contrasted to the wholesale disregard for feudal convention that characterizes the French 'revolt'" ( Shakespeare's Heroical Histories: Henry VI and Its Literary Tradition [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971], 83). [BACK]

22. Ibid., 102. [BACK]

23. The Duke of Somerset, "who long before was warned to eschew all Castles," dies under the alehouse sign of the castle in Edward Hall's Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke (1548); see Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare , 3:124. [BACK]

24. I have been unable to trace the reference. But Lewis may have had in mind Thomas More's observation that travelers easily discover man-eaters and monsters, "but it is not so easy to find good citizens and wise governments" ( Utopia , trans. and ed. Adams, 8), or the medieval Aeneas, who expresses his disappointment at the backwardness of Italy: "I do not know if there is any grain or castle or city; I have seen nothing wilder. If we find no provisions here, we have no reason to stay" ( Eneas: A Twelfth-Century French Romance , 62). [BACK]

25. The "Diario" of Christopher Columbus's First Voyage to America, 1492-1493: Abstracted by Fray Bartolomé de las Casas , ed. Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley, Jr. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 58-63. [BACK]

26. A word for "temple" picked up by the Spanish in the Antilles. [BACK]

27. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico , trans. A. P. Maudslay (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1956), 190-191. [BACK]

28. Murrin, The Allegorical Epic , 138-139. [BACK]

29. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 132. [BACK]

30. In a book deeply indebted to Stephen Greenblatt's idea of improvisation in Renaissance Self-Fashioning , Tzvetan Todorov has pointed out that for one who is truly unsympathetic to a foreign culture, it makes no difference whether one recoils from its horrors or openly embraces its values because one sees them as similar to one's own. Either reaction is ethnocentric; see Tzvetan Todorov's The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper and Row, 1984). [BACK]

31. Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico , 191. [BACK]

32. Ibid., 205. [BACK]

33. See Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). [BACK]

34. Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness , xvi, in Elizabethan Plays , ed. Arthur C. Nethercot (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 840. [BACK]

35. The shift is part of the transition from medieval to modern England. Lawrence Stone ascribes a crisis of the hereditary elite to the period of 1580-1620. Armed retainers are replaced by coach and footmen, private castles by private houses; North and West are nationalized and their violence subdued; abstract liberty and public interest give way to particular liberties and ancient customs; radical Protestantism elevates individual conscience over the claims of obedience to family, church, nation; noblemen turn to books, and for the first time in history, the "intelligentsia" became a branch of the propertied classes ( The Crisis of the Aristocracy [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965], 15). [BACK]