Britomart Redeems Faire Amoret illustrates a scene from book III of The Faerie Queene, a 16th-century allegorical epic poem by Edmund Spenser, in which Busirane, an evil sorcerer, abducts the beautiful Amoret (representing married virtue), and tortures her to the point of death.
In the original poem, Busirane had tortured and cut out the heart of the still-living Amoret by the time of her rescue.