The poem was said to have antagonized Lord Burghley, the primary secretary of Elizabeth I, and estranged Spenser from the English court, despite his success in that arena with his previous (and most famous) work, The Faerie Queene.
[2] The other likely possibility is that Spenser drew inspiration from Anton Francesco Doni's work, La Moral Filosophia, which is a collection of stories akin to Aesop's Fables.
[3] Spenser chose to sell "Mother Hubberd's Tale" separately[4] from the other works in the collection it was from, and scholars have debated the reason for this choice.
Another theory is that Spenser was worried about the quality of the Tale, and wanted to be able to pull it out if it did not receive a good reaction without removing the entirety of the Complaints at once.
The phrase he uses, 'Should with vile cloaths approach Gods maieatie,/ whom no uncleannes may approachen nie’ does not directly correlate to the passage he seems to wish to reference.
That passage is from the second letter to the Corinthians, in chapter six, verse seventeen: 'Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you.