This chapter argues that Edmund Spenser is at his most deeply political when he invites his readers to immerse themselves in the lush flowerbeds of his poetry. Immersive reading of the lavish and apparently “pointless” descriptions and inventories of flowers in The Shepheardes Calendar, Virgils Gnat, Muiopotmos, and the Garden of Adonis in The Faerie Queene reveal Spenser at his most resistant to submitting the poetic word to the ideological controls associated with the Crown and the court. Spenser plants his flowerbeds in the morally positive terrain of the liberty of speech and poetic license.

The epilogue shows how Ovid’s early modern legacy leads to the defense of two famous women, the Biblical Eve and the Augustan Julia, as Ovidian heroines whose life stories record their relations to parrhesia and republicanism. Milton’s Eve is the greatest Ovidian and republican creation of Paradise Lost, the first of Our First Parents to represent the “filial freedom” that counts as “true authority in men” and also the essentially republican conviction that God can and should be found in the peers drawn together within republics and social contracts. Wharton’s Julia is Eve’s counterpart. She is the first reader of Ovid who believes in the power of his poetry to create a commonwealth of letters that can and will survive his own life as well as his exile. This chapter brings to a conclusion the book’s broad concern with women as readers of Ovid who move the poet’s political convictions forward to new generations and epochs. It simultaneously gestures toward the further work that may be done to show how Ovid’s poetic legacy has long worked toward patterns of social and political change.

Chaucer’s God considers how characters invoke God, both in terms of the everyday language of late medieval England and in the ways that the idea of God is reflected in Chaucer’s fiction. Conventional, non-theological utterances of the names for God by Chaucer’s characters as part of their, by turns, outwardly pious and unthinkingly impious phraseologies are discussed in the opening section, God Woot – ‘God knows’. Under the heading God Forwoot – ‘God foreknows’, some of the more challenging invocations of God are considered, such as the implications of divine foreknowledge and predestination on human free will in the Knight’s Tale, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde. The concluding section, God in a Cruel World, asks whether in the Clerk’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale, if Chaucer allowed his tales to reflect, and characters to reflect upon, the heretical notion of a God lacking in compassion for humanity.

Rather than trawl through medieval philosophical texts for references to selfhood, I analyse a story Chaucer knew well: that of Narcissus and Echo. Narcissus’s fatal encounter with his own reflection suggests a number of points: i) that self-awareness is associated with sight (the word ‘introspection’ means ‘looking within’); ii) that beauty also is associated with sight; iii) that love makes one self-aware (Narcissus understands that his love-object is himself, not that that helps him any); iv) that sight can be ironically linked to moral blindness. Chaucer explores all these points, often with reference to mirrors, and to women in love or being loved. Medieval mirrors were usually small and convex, requiring the viewer to stand close to interpret the distorted images from multiple angles that they generated. Chaucer especially represents women experiencing how it feels to ‘be me’, making of his own poetry a mirror that reflects from oblique positions.