Not a historian nor even much of literary scholar nowadays, but I studied Spenser in college and enjoyed dissecting his poetry. The thing about Spenser's writing is that it was very topical. As with his earlier poetry, the Faerie Queene reflected his aspirations to establish himself within the Elizabethan court and was larded with a lot of veiled references to the factional political and ideological battles of the day. So where Victorians might prefer to focus on the moral allegory and literary dimensions of the Faerie Queene, as well as it place in a much more developed notion of the English literary canon, I imagine contemporary early moderns readers would have been more attuned to the political and topical implications of the work.

I recognize that this doesn't really answer your question about how the two periods differed in their understanding of the age of chivalry but perhaps provides some sense of the different ways critical readers of each period might have approached Spenser's work itself. If I had to take a stab at that particular question, I would say, for Spenser himself, the age of chivalry was less about some misty Pre-Raphaelite vision of romantic purity and more about evoking an emblematic cultural trope that reflected the hawkish Protestant ideology of his patrons at court.