The Faerie Queene

Edmund Spenser set out to write an epic that would do for English what Virgil did for Rome — and built it around knights who each embody a single virtue: Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, Courtesy. The Redcrosse Knight's fight against the dragon alone has outlived nearly everything else written in Elizabethan England, a foundational quest narrative wrapped in dense allegory and dedicated, not at all subtly, to Queen Elizabeth I herself.Dense, strange, and enormously influential — this is the poem that gave English literature its own invented stanza form and its own mythic vocabulary of virtue versus vice, still traceable in fantasy and adventure fiction centuries later.