'This very welcome collection offers twelve essays both by young scholars and by senior figures who have shaped the field of Spensers medieval roots, specifically here in Chaucer. Studies that interrogate the continuities and transformations (rather than outright rejections) between the English middle ages and early modern period have grown in recent years pre-eminently in the work of Helen Cooper, one of this volumes contributors ... What emerges from this collaborative study of Spenser in relation a collaborative medieval writer is not a retrograde conservatism on Spensers part, but rather a demonstration of the dynamics of Spenserian poetry. As Archer writes in the collections final essay, with the seductive binary of the old and the new, Spenser hoodwinks his readers into taking untenable stances on either side [I]n fact his work breaks down even attempts to reconcile the two.'
The Spenser Review
Rachel Stenner is Senior Lecturer in English Literature, 1350-1660 at the University of Sussex
Tamsin Badcoe is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol
Gareth Griffith is a former Senior Lecturer and Director of Part Time Programmes at the University of Bristol
Introduction - Rachel Stenner, Tamsin Badcoe, Gareth Griffith
1 Chaucers Troilus and Criseyde in Spensers Amoretti and The Faerie Queene: reading historically and intertextually - Judith H. Anderson
2 Litle herd gromes piping in the wind: The Shepheardes Calender, The House of Fame, and La Compleynt - Helen Barr
3 Diverse pageants: normative arrays of sexuality - Helen Cooper
4 The source of poetry: Pernaso, Paradise, and Spensers Chaucerian craft - Claire Eager
5 Chaucer in Ireland: archaism, etymology, and the idea of development - William Rhodes
6 Wise wights in privy places: rhyme and stanza form in Spenser and Chaucer - Richard Danson Brown
7 Romancing Geoffrey: Chaucer and romance in the manuscript tradition - Gareth Griffith
8 Cultivating Chaucerian antiquity in The Shepheardes Calender - Megan L. Cook
9 Worthy friends: Speghts Chaucer and Speghts Spenser - Elisabeth Chaghafi
10 Chaucers Beast Group and Mother Hubberds Tale - Brendan OConnell
11 Propagating authority: poetic tradition in The Parliament of Fowls and the Mutabilitie Cantos - Craig A. Berry
12 New matter framed upon the old: Chaucer, Spenser, and Luke Shepherds New Poet - Harriet Archer
Bibliography of books and essays on Chaucer and Spenser
Index