Canto vii rewinds to explain how Amoret and Britomart become separated, and we began by wondering, what does it mean that Amoret wanders off “for pleasure, or for need” (4)—is she just relieving herself; does such a basic function have an allegorical standing? Or is it under or before allegory; and if so, why does it trigger the lurid allegorical episode that ensures? For it is this pleasure or need that precipitates her, and the reader, into the psychosexual fantasia of Lust, a big-nosed quasi-comical emblem of human genitalia, especially but not only male. The description, in its mix of eating, defecating, and desire, recalls the horror of sexuality that nearly deflects Britomart back in Book III, but it is more cartoonish, laughable. Who is its real audience? (Surely not Chaucer?) The narrator seems at pains to dissociate himself. Amoret cries out only “feebly” (4) when she is seized—we wondered if there isn’t something etiolated about her “little love,” perhaps like Scudamour’s, two characters rarely able to assert will under the pressures of allegory. What to make of Aemylia, and her stage-comedy story of defying her father to run off with a squire of low degree? (That lust should intercept her tryst seems typical of how allegorical encounters function as diagnostic psychomachia—but again, it is less clear how this could be true for Amoret.) Amoret’s complaint, and Aemylia’s initial answer, have at moments an austere, almost metaphysical beauty. But with twenty days of captivity, and seven men eaten, there is also a lot of obscure allegorical signaling going on. “Self to forget to mind another, is oversight” (10) detained us: whence this strange counsel of selfishness? [JD]