2. Sidney
This year's contributions to Sidney Studies saw a monograph, essays in a collection, and several articles. Michael Mack's monograph concentrates on Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry (Mack 2005). Mack's main thesis is that Sidney develops a bold and original theory of poetry and the role of humanity in the world. Mack argues that the main premise of Sidney's Apology is often overlooked. Where other commentators, such as George Puttenham, compared the poet to God in order to state what the poet does not do, Sidney gives the poet a share of God's power: just as God has to power to redeem humankind so poets have the power to transform their readers. Mack emphasizes Sidney's debt to his Italian predecessors but argues that the Apology differs in being a work of criticism, a work about literature rather than a work of literature. After outlining the significance of his book and its place in the field in the introduction Mack moves on to his first chapter entitled "The History of Creativity" which provides just that, a detailed history of the development of poetic and divine creation. As Mack points out in the introduction, this a complex topic but one to which Sidneians should pay more attention. Chapter 2 considers Sidney's debt to the allegorical tradition, arguing that the Apology is more consistently allegorical than has hitherto been acknowledged and that in the Apology Sidney fuses allegory with rhetoric in a wholly original manner. In Chapter 3 Mack interprets some important terms used by Sidney in the Apology beginning (as makes sense) with the word 'idea' itself. As is the case throughout this study, Mack provides the reader with an clear, historically-rooted analysis which considers Sidney's predecessors, his contemporaries and those who followed. Chapter 4 engages with the distinction between divine creation and human making with which Sidney, like many before him, was concerned while Chapter 5 considers Sidney's view of the poet himself, distinct from the prophet by his ordinariness though with a fervent and evangelical spirit. Mack emphasizes what he terms the "kinship" between Sidney and the romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge (p. 135). Where chapter 5 focused on the poet, chapter 6 considers the reader via the golden figure of Cyrus who alerts Sidney's readers both to their own brazen state and the perfection to which they aspire. The book ends with Chapter 7 and a consideration of modernity and the role of Sidney's theory of poetry, specifically its relation to an emerging secularization. This is a nicely-argued and critically-engaged work but one small criticism from this reviewer is that a more overt conclusion might have been added to more satisfactorily complete it.
A collection of essays concentrating on versions of the sacred appeared this year and two essays were of interest to Sidneians. Focusing on a number of early modern sonneteers, Irmgard Maasen explores the sonnet's potential for disrupting religious idealization (Maassen 2005). In her section on Sidney, Maassen argues convincingly that "Sidney's failure to deify his Stella reflects . . . on his position as a failed courtier under Elizabeth" (p. 180). Although Stella is adored she is not divine and instead it is masculine desire, externalized and projected onto Cupid, which is deified. As Maassen makes clear, Sidney may have Queen Elizabeth in mind since she thwarted his ambitions to further the Protestant cause in Europe. Verena Olejniczak's essay is concerned with early modern concepts of perfection, specifically how such concepts were no longer theologically-based (Lobsien 2005). Via analysis of the courtly ideal in Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier and other texts Olejniczak considers the role of dissimulation in self-fashioning. According to Olejniczak, Sidney's Old Arcadia explores the nature of dissimulation via the trope of cross-dressing and although the effort to perform perfection is considered desirable, perfection is sacred and thus utterly unattainable.
Wendy Olmstead considers the role of rhetoric in Sidney's Old Arcadia, specifically the tension between forceful speech, which compelled the listener to agree by force of argument, and a speech that is more gentle and persuasive (Olmstead 2005). Forceful speech was valued by Classical, Christian, and Renaissance rhetoricians but there is evidence also for "an alternative discourse" (p. 157). Following Norbert Elias, Olmstead contextualizes the shift toward the gentle in socio-political circumstances, notably the alteration of nobility from a warrior to a courtly class. In the Old Arcadia masculine self-rule is praised but so too is conversation and friendship. It is generally in the first half of this admirable essay that Olmstead traces Classical, Christian, and Renaissance views on persuasive speech and its impact upon friendship before moving on to a greater focus on Sidney's Old Arcadia. The poem explores contradictions arising from attempts by Musidorus to use forceful speech so that his friend might overcome the effeminizing effects of love for a woman. Olmstead also considers Sidney's views on the role gender had to play in evaluating speech and shows how, in the Old Arcadia, he "idealizes feminine powers of civilizing conversation and friendship" (p. 180), thus challenging the dominant view that female virtue depended upon obedience and silence.
Nandra Perry's essay begins with a study of Thomas Rogers, an Elizabethan cleric and writer of religious pamphlets (Perry 2005). Some of his work is what one might expect from a Protestant cleric, including anti-Catholic material, but most of it includes what Perry terms "Protestantized translations" (p. 365) of pre-Reformation and counter-Reformation devotional texts, including Thomas a Kempis' Imitatio Christi. In more than one publication Rogers defended his subject matter, arguing that Catholic material was entirely relevant to the Protestant reader. How English Protestants dealt with anxieties surrounding the Catholic model of imitatio preoccupies Perry for much of the essay but the focus is firmly on Philip Sidney in a section devoted to his Defence of Poetry which considers Sidney's negotiation between the divine and the secular in his prose text. For Sidney poetry was "a unique form of imitation that relies on ideal rather than material or historical models" (p. 391). As Perry points out, this classical notion was developed by Sidney who thought poetry distinct from ordinary language and the poet's desire a phenomenon that allowed him to transcend the ordinary world. Unlike the unmediated word, poetry is tainted by human sin but this is an essential condition of its operation. Despite Sidney's claims for poetry as ideal "the cumulative effect of the Defence is to underscore the inefficiency and unreliability of language as a vehicle of divine presence" (p. 400). But this, argues Perry, was for Sidney precisely the point: it is only when humans have understood how far they have fallen that they can long for a return to a state of grace and it is this desire rather than its fulfillment that signals right imitatio.
Two articles from this year's Sidney Journal focused on the Sidney psalter. Beth Quitslund (Quitslund 2005) outlines critical responses to the Sidney psalms which have been interpreted variously as primarily liturgical, literary, or "a re-envisioning of the liturgy as literary" (p. 96). According to Quitslund the early reception of the psalms indicates a desire to use them musically but this involved huge difficulties because although Phillip may have intended his psalms for singing, his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, "made a conscious decision to change their purpose" (p. 103). It seems that Pembroke did not intend their book to compete with The Whole Booke of Psalmes used in churches. The volume was, rather, suited to replace individual or communal prayers and Quitslund argues that the Sidney psalter is original in its aim to sanctify poetry in the service of the divine. Hannibal Hamlin notes that although the psalms had fallen out of favour by the nineteenth century they were incredibly influential in the seventeenth century and were, as critics have noted, crucial in shaping the devotional lyric (Hamlin 2005). However, as Hamlin points out, less focus has been given to their influence on their own specific genre, the metrical psalm, and Hamlin here corrects that omission. The specific debt was to two formal features adopted by imitators: "metrical and stanzaic variety" and "a flexible treatment of the line, using enjambment and medial caesurae" (p. 137-138). Hamlin usefully traces a number of psalms clearly influenced by the Sidney psalter, amongst them those by Phineas Fletcher and Francis Davison.
This year's Notes and Queries contains an piece by Tom Lockwood, which alerts Sidneians to a manuscript in Leed's University Library (Lockwood 2005). The manuscript concerned is from the Brotherton Collection, verse "of the mid-1620s onwards, predominantly associated with Hatfield house and the household of William Cecil, Viscount Cranborne and second Earl of Salisbury (1591-1668)" (p. 227). The manuscript contains an anonymous sequence of ten poems addressed to Hatfield and its inhabitants. The first in the sequence contains hitherto unnoticed allusions to Ben Jonson's poem "To Penshurst" and its inhabitant Philip Sidney which, as Lockwood rightly notes, is evidence of the literary esteem in which Jonson and Sidney were held in this period.
3. Spenser
As we shall see, there were quite a few articles considering Spenser's classical sources this year but Syrithe's Pugh provided the only book length study (Pugh 2005). Pugh's focus is on Ovid and Spenser's use of Ovidian literary strategies in The Shepheardes Calender and The Faerie Queene as well as some of what are usually considered to be his minor poems. Pugh's monograph sets out to correct what she considers to be the Virgilocentric reading of Spenser, a reading she argues has been overplayed by New Historicists, keen to position Spenser primarily as the voice of Elizabeth imperialism (although one might argue that this is a relatively recent development in Spenser Studies and for too long Spenser's career in Ireland and his related ambitions were virtually ignored). For Pugh, Spenser's imperialism is not the whole story and her book endeavours to reassert the balance by focusing on analogies between Spenser and Ovid. In chapter 1 Pugh detects in The Shepheardes Calender the influence of Ovid's Fasti and his exile elegies; Colin's exile in Ireland is a comment on Spenser's own distance from court and negative effects of love function as a warning to Elizabeth against marriage to the Duc d'Alencon. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 consider the early books of The Faerie Queene, specifically Spenser's engagement with the tensions between Virgilian and Ovidian poetics, and argue that Ovidian romance is privileged over Virglian epic. Chapter 5 is focused on the Amoretti and Colin Clouts Come Home Again, where Pugh argues that Spenser, like Ovid, emerges as a confident poet not despite but because of his exile: Elizabeth's competitive, indeed Petrarchan, court has been replaced by love and society in Ireland. In Chapter 6 Pugh considers the later books of The Faerie Queene in the context of a benevolent exile distinct from the degenerate court, a point developed in chapter 7 on The Mutabilite Cantos and its Ovidian scrutiny of monarchial power. This is an eminently readable study but it is not clear why it ends as it does: toward the end of chapter 7 (the final chapter) there is a section of less than four pages entitled "Conclusion: Elizabeth, Niobe, Mutabilite and Spenser's Reversal of the Myths of Power" but there is no conclusion to the study as a whole, which would have been more satisfactory. Notably, Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland is referred to only briefly and one wonders whether Pugh might not have made a stronger case for her view of Spenser as anti-imperialist by a more thorough examination of this text.
Also considering Ovid, Louise Gilbert Freeman interrogates Spenser attitude to allegory, specifically its inability to deliver truth (Freeman 2005). Focusing on The Mutabilitie Cantos Freeman argues that in this work especially Spenser associates poetic invention with metamorphosis but that "the larger poetic project is made vulnerable by these cantos, which cast doubt on the poem's potential to mediate between man and transcendent values" (p. 66). In his revision of Ovid's story of Actaeon and Diana, Faunus (who represents Actaeon) is not transformed but rather "the poet playfully demystifies Ovid's text, and, by extension, his own. Here metamorphosis is poetic fabrication; poetic fabrication metamorphosis" (p. 69). Spenser is keen to indicate that where Ovid's story is dependant on illusion his engages with reality: unlike Giordano Bruno, for whom "Actaeon's moment of sighting Diana is a complete visionary experience" (p. 73), Spenser's Diana is arguably "a flawed object of contemplation" (p76), ultimately she is merely a naked woman rather than an embodiment of truth. In a coda to her essay Freeman argues that Spenser's references to the veil worn by Nature indicate that, despite his plea for a vision of truth, poetry remains unilluminated and the veil, like allegory itself, blinds the reader from truth.
Staying with Spenser's debt to classical myth, Jessica Wolfe considers the influence of Homeric epic, and one specific motif from it, on The Faerie Queene (Wolfe 2005). As Wolfe rightly notes, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are less a focus for Spenserians than more obvious sources such as Virgil's Aeneid and Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata. Although much of Spenser's knowledge of Homer was mediated through Virgil, Tasso and others, he most likely also read Homer in the original. As Wolfe points out, a central motif of the Renaissance epic, the relationship between love and strife, is not unique to Homer but Spenser appears to have been influenced by Homer's renditions of the motif, specifically in the form of a krisis, that is "a situation or event that requires judging or distinguishing between competing values such as harmony and discord, ease and toil, or contemplation and action" (p.1223). Wolfe focuses on one key aspect of Homeric mythography of strife that engaged Spenser: the golden chain, which he used "as both a master metaphor for his own narrative . . . and as a flexible conceit capable of embodying both correct and erroneous theological, cosmological, and ethical beliefs about the relationship between harmony and strife and between liberty and necessity" (p. 1224). In this lengthy article Wolfe traces Spenser's use of the motif through numerous episodes--amongst them Philotime's chain in Book 2, Guyon's adventures in the Bower of Bliss (also in Book 2), and the golden chain of Book 1, canto 9--indentifying in detail Spenser's critique and approval of the Homeric sources on which they are based.
Also concerned with Spenser's classical sources is Anthony Miller (Miller 2005b). Miller notes that although it is well known that the proem to Book 2 of The Faerie Queene imitates "a poetic self-vindication" in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, it may also derive from a "little noticed" (p. 1) source for the proem, Apuleius' Metamorphoses and a source that has hitherto been entirely overlooked, the elder Pliny's Naturalis historia. Miller details the parallels between Spenser and Pliny's apologia: "both ask rhetorical questions in forceful triplets", give "geographical examples" of lands that had seemed purely imaginative, and provide evidence for their claims (p. 5). Spenser does however, differ from Pliny since Faerie land, unlike Pliny's Ethiopia cannot be discovered or documented. In Spenser's use of Pliny, Miller detects a comedic trajectory with Spenser highlighting "his own illogical enthusiasm" which recalls Ariosto's use of Apuleius.
Moving on to sources other than the classical, Joseph Parry is interested in the interface between Spenser and Petrarch and their engagement with St Augustine's Confessions (Parry 2005). Petrarch is drawn to and at the same time repelled by Augustine's choice between human and divine love and Spenser recognized the crisis of selfhood in Petrarch to be a crisis of faith "which reveals itself at love's referral or denial" (p. 28). Much of Parry's essay is an analysis of Petrarch but is valuable for its consideration of Spenser's reaction to him: Parry regards Spenser's allegory of chastity as evidence of his rejection of the "discourse of mournful love" (p. 36). Scudamour is "a conspicuous image of Petrarch's persona: the solitary, immobilized, self-scattered into the irreconcilable fidelities that God and Laura each represents" (p. 38) and both Busirane and Scudamour represent human desire as self-centered and self-destructive. When Britomart offers to die helping Scudamour and Amoret, Spenser introduces into his narrative "a kind of selflessness that is alien to Petrarch's poetry" (p. 43). By thus offering herself to others Britomart learns that genuine love is not self-obsessed.
Spenser's use of source material is also of interest to Hassan Melehy (Melehy 2005). Melehy suggests that in The Ruines of Time (the poem that opens his Complaints collection) Spenser credits his predecessors but also makes it clear that their poetry is the ruins from which he will build his own poetry and facilitate the poetry of the future. Melehy notes that in the Ruines of Time Spenser ponders questions that are evident throughout the Complaints: whether poetry can move beyond earthly vanity, the relationship between poetic immortality and the immortality of the soul, and whether poetic immortality is mere vanity or a dream of wish-fulfillment. In a detailed exploration of the poem Melehy considers Spenser's response to these questions and concludes that Spenser looks to Phillip Sidney's Defense of Poetry, adding to Sidney's poetic project and fusing the mortal and immortal in a celebration of poetry as a vanity, certainly, but one whose lesson will be repeated in the future.
Staying with sources, Susan Carter suggests that Spenser's Duessa is indebted to the Loathly Lady motif in Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale but also in Irish myth (Carter 2005). Carter outlines one of the Irish tales, the Adventures of the Sons of Eochaid, and notes that, unlike Chaucer's tale, here we have a detailed description of the hag. Gower's The Tale of Florent also contains a description of the woman involved and at one point his description is racist, something picked up by Spenser in his construction of Duessa who challenges what it means to be English and Protestant. The hag in the Irish tales "inspires Irish nationalism" (p. 11) whereas Duessa threatens good rule, specifically good rule in Ireland.
Chaucer appears again in Glenn A. Steinberg essay which engages with the critical commonplace that Spenser assumes a mask of Chaucerian humility in order to gain a particular advantage (Steinberg 2005). As Steinberg notes, critics disagree as to what that advantage might be but there is a consensus that the early moderns mis-read Chaucer, wrongly perceiving the multiplicity of voices he employed as univocal and moralistic and with little sense of his deliberate irony and self-effacement. This would seem to undermine the idea that Spenser understood Chaucer's multiplicity of voices and the ironic persona he adopted as a model for writing humble poetry. Although dominant figures such as Ascham, Sidney, and Puttenham seek to undermine Chaucer's literary achievements, argues Steinberg, responses defending Chaucer are as numerous as attacks upon him. Focusing on The Shepheardes Calender Steingberg makes a solid argument for Spenser as one of Chaucer's defenders and, moreover, one who satirizes Chaucer's critics.
Chloe Wheatley considers Spenser's approach to history and its sources (Wheatley 2005). In Book 2 of The Faerie Queene Guyon reads the history of fairy land, "presumably . . . the extensive account compiled by Eumnestes that details the lineal succession of fairy kings" (p. 858) but the narrator provides the reader with a condensed version of this account, one taking up only seven stanzas. For Wheatley this signals Spenser's awareness of "the distinct potential of the summary form" and the role such forms played in "the dissemination of Renaissance history" (p. 858). The historical epitome should be considered an important genre alongside the chronicle, chorography, genealogy, and prophecy, and not an inferior version of history. As Wheatley points out, traditional objections to the genre were being challenged in the period and defenders emphasized its usefulness. Wheatley argues that Spenser draws a comparison between Briton moniments, the book read by Arthur in Book 2, and that read by Guyon: while the former is focused on the distant past and dynastic historiography, the latter looks toward England's future, especially the shift from martial to civil rule valued in the fairy epitome.
Guillaume Coatelen's fascinating article presents a manuscript from the Bodleian library in Oxford which offers a compilation on poetry--from Harington's preface to his translation of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and from Spenser's Shepheardes Calender--and notes on the poetry (Coatalen 2005). Clues indicate that the author was male and Catholic, not least because of his criticism of the "irreligious state" of Spenser's Faerie Queene. Other evidence indicates that the transcription was written sometime between 1585 and 1650 and possibly shortly after 1595. Coatalen reproduces the annotated transcript and, in a separate section, gives a detailed analysis of its contents. Spenser, and to a lesser extent Harington, are considered authorities on poetry, specifically due to their use of "higher classical and biblical instances" (p. 740). Reference to The Shepheardes Calender is interesting because the commentator makes no distinction between the poem and the annotator, identifying E. K. with Spenser and thus, as Coatalen points out, presenting "an example of contemporary response" (p. 741). It is not entirely surprising that the October eclogue "is quoted three times in a row" and "thought to define the poem most accurately" (p. 741) since the eclogue discusses the state of poetry. Coatalen discusses the variants between the original printed texts and the manuscript, which are described as "not unusual" (p. 741). There are links between the manuscript and Francis Meres's section on 'Poetrie' in his anthology Palladis Tamia Wits Treasure (1598) as well as Baines note on Marlowe's alleged religious opinions, and Nashe on fairies and statesmen in The Terrors of the Night. The compiler accuses Spenser of mocking religion, most likely Catholicism, and criticizes allegory. He also condemns Spenser's cowardice for denying the existence of fairies, even though he believed in them, because he was afraid of being considered Catholic at a time when Catholics were being persecuted. Braggadocchio and Trompart "are not seen as farcical characters but as representatives of the poet, who is repeatedly and consistently accused of double-dealing" (p. 748). The manuscript is a valuable document because, as Coatalen points out, "negative criticism of Spenser's works is hard to come by, and the note offers a unique instance of violent reaction to his epic" (p. 743).
Staying with manuscripts of interest to Spenserians, Christopher Burlinson and Andrew Zurcher present a useful overview of the study of the historical context of Spenser's literary career, specifically those manuscripts in his hand: letters relating to his service in Ireland (Burlinson & Zurcher 2005). Burlinson and Zurcher clearly state the aims of their paper: "to correct and improve upon previous attempts to characterize the archive of surviving Spenserian manuscripts; to provide a summary account of their contents; and to offer an analysis of some of the paleographical and textual features of these manuscripts with the ultimate goal of improving our understanding of the Lord Deputy's secretariat, and of Spenser's role within it, in the period 1580-82" (p. 31). The authors correct what they term "A number of assumptions and unsubstantiated claims" (p. 46) made by eminent Spenserians about Spenser's secretarial career in Ireland, a typical example being confusion over how much he was paid as Grey's secretary and thus how much importance was attached to his service. The conclusion they come to, that Spenser was a servant not a close friend of Grey nor his confidant, is important. They provide at the end of the article an invaluable chronological list of diplomatic manuscripts associated with Spenser.
Also focusing on Spenser's career in Ireland was Robin E. Bates (Bates 2005). Critics have long recognized Spenser's criticism of English Common Law in Ireland in A View of the Present State of Ireland but, as Robin E. Bates points out, none have considered the following question: was Spenser specifically advocating the use of Civil Law? . Via engagement with a range of critical opinions on Spenser's view of law in Ireland Bates concludes that the answer is yes: Spenser complains that the queen and her policies are undermined in Ireland and civil law, which allowed the monarch greater privileges than common law, is necessary. Interestingly, Bates argues that it is not so much the Irish who generate Ireland's problems as the law itself. Spenser believed that the law should serve the monarch and instituting civil law in Ireland would effectively sort things out.
In an eminently readable and historically informed essay Lisa Celovsky draws attention to the comparative neglect of masculinity in Spenser Studies (Celovsky 2005). Her focus is on chivalry and patriarchy, specifically how the former reflects contemporary conceptions of sexual difference while latter has been considered exclusively in terms of women. As Celovsky points out, critics have commented little on what patriarchy meant for men, noting that it is not equivalent to maleness since "not all masculinities are authoritarian" (p. 211-212). The essay considers Artegall, Marinell, Timias, and Scudamour from Spenser's Faerie Queene, all of whom are "coming of age. . . . negotiating transitions from knight errantry to householding, with varying degrees of success and failure, of willingness and unwillingness" (p. 212). Celovsky situates her reading of the poem in early modern ideas about the male transition from childhood to adulthood, tracing a paradigm of masculine development that would have been familiar to Spenser's contemporaries, what Celovsky terms "youth" and "man-age". It is perhaps not surprising that expectations were often inconsistent between one 'state' and another, for example man-age curtailed the autonomy thought necessary for a successful youth. Celovsky identifies these inconsistencies or tensions in Spenser's poem where "knightly vainglory and martial aggression oppose the poem's dynastic and genealogical concerns, and perennial chivalric conflicts obstruct the poem's movement toward marriages and their resulting peace, productivity, and civil order" (p. 217). Although the bachelor knight seeks fame and immortality, the husband's duties, specifically providing heirs, announce the inevitability of his death. Throughout her reading of Spenser's poem Celovsky draws comparisons between the episodes under consideration and those from the Spanish prose romance Amadis of Gaul as well as other texts Spenser would presumably have known. For Celovsky a more useful approach than the traditional one which differentiates gendered experience is that which has already been applied to Shakespeare Studies: the extent to which Spenser is concerned with youthful (male and female) rebellion against authority. This makes senses since, as Celovsky rightly points out, young men as well as young women experienced considerable anxieties in the pressure to conform although one might argue that the rewards for the former were, indeed still are, considerably more substantial.
In a clearly argued and entertaining essay A. D. Nuttall responds to Martha Craig's account of The Faerie Queene as too alien and unaccountable for modern readers (Nuttall 2005). For Nuttall this is best explained by reference to Spenser's Protestantism and via Brecht's concept of alienation. Spenser's allegory contains significant Catholic allusions but, claims Nuttall, emphasis is on the metaphorical not the literal: Spenser discourages his reader from dwelling on the art itself, which could become an kind of idol, and, rather, urges the reader to move on, making sense of the poem's meaning rather than its appearance. Like Brecht, Spenser starves the reader of the kind of realism they find in Shakespeare so as to reinforce the notion that truth is found not in the world around us but in the realm of ideas. Nuttall asserts that what we find in Spenser is Platonised Protestantism: his desire, following Plato, to separate the thing itself from its associations, for example the true religion from Catholic symbols of it. In order to adequately do this Spenser 'depresses' his art; his stiffness and lack of reality is wholly deliberate. Nuttall characterizes Spenser's poem as mock Gothic in that it is "aware of its own separateness from its original" (p. 216). Ultimately, asserts Nuttall, the alienation found in The Faerie Queene is a subtle substitute for iconoclasm.
Two essays focused on the links between Spenser's Shepheardes Calender and The Faerie Queene. Paul J. Hecht argues that far from dropping one style (pastoral eclogue) in favour of another (the Spenserian stanza), The Shepheardes Calender reveals Spenser's efforts to master the latter (Hecht 2005). Crucially, argues Hecht, Spenser's emerging skills as an epic poet appear not, as one might expect, in glimpses of the stanzaic form apparent in the earlier pastoral work but, rather, "is most visible in those parts of the Calender that bear the least formal resemblance to the Spenserian stanza" (p. 316). Via comparison with Michael Drayton's The Shepheards Garland (1593), a response to The Shepheardes Calender, Hecht provides thorough readings of Spenser's pastoral poetry in order to support his argument that Spenser's earlier work reveals stylistic experimentation that would develop and emerge in his later epic. Via E. K.'s commentary on the "Februarie" eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender Adam McKeown investigates the concept of enargeia in Britomart's encounters with pictures in Book III of The Faerie Queene (McKeown 2005). McKeown is interested in the interface between speech and image and the meanings pictures can convey. What emerges in the episodes he considers is a confusion between Britomart as symbol of chastity and the sensuality that would cancel that virtue. This confusion often begins when efforts are made to impose a firm meaning on a image. As McKeown makes clear, "images engage our interpretative faculties only to resist them: meaning can neither be extracted from nor imposed upon the images" (p. 55). But words themselves can resist interpretation and, suggests McKeown, mirror "the reader's process of coping with pictorial effect" (p. 55). According to McKeown, Spenser suggests all art as a site of interpretative possibility and encourages the reader/viewer to engage with both reason and the sensual.
Joseph Campana's essay appeared in a special volume of PMLA focusing on poetry and coordinated by Bruce R. Smith (Campana 2005). Campana confronts a significant absence in the Spenser canon (which should interest Sidneians also) when he notes that "In a literary tradition full of apologies, confessions, and retractions" (p. 34), Spenser seems never to have written a defense of poetry but, rather, presents a defense of love in the opening to the Legend of Friendship, Book 4 of The Faerie Queene. Campana considers various defenses of poetry before moving on to a consideration of Book 2 of The Faerie Queene, where Spenser launches what appears to be a defense of poetry but "shifts from a strategy of defense to one of redefinition" (p. 38), moving away from that which can be "empirically verified", for example Faery Land, which "defies precise location and measure" (p. 39). Campana concludes that instead of a defense Spenser offers his readers energeia, "the energy of experiencing human corporeality in pleasure and in pain: an experience embodied in a physicality uniquely available to poetry", suggesting that for Spenser poetry "runs beneath all clear perception and resonates with the connective tissue of affective and corporeal experience" (p. 46) and thus all efforts to defend poetry will fail.
By far the best essay to emerge from this year's Spenser Studies was a well-researched and thoughtful piece by Emily A. Bernhard Jackson which revaluates Busirane as doctor rather than an evil sorcerer (Jackson 2005). Drawing upon medical ideas contemporaneous with Spenser she makes a compelling case for Busirane's actions--drawing blood from Amoret's heart which is placed in a basin--being primarily medical rather than sadistic. Busirane doesn't detach the heart, and so does not kill Amoret, but, rather, places it in the basis much as a surgeon would. Furthermore, suggests Jackson, Busirane's 'bleeding' of Amoret suggests "a form of substitute or additional menstruation" (p. 113) and might constitute an attempt to regulate the bad humours it was believed accumulated in women every month. Also possible is that Busirane attempts not a substitute for menstruation but an effort to regulate an imbalance in her passions as demonstrated by her love for Scudamour. Jackson quotes from a range of medial treatises in order to show that Busirane's behaviour, though undoubtedly brutal and self-centered, would have been acknowledged by Spenser's readers as a logical medical procedure. Jackson also considers early modern religious beliefs associated with the heart, amongst them the belief that "the heart could be cleansed and cleared by religious faith" (p. 117), which has clear parallels to the actions of Busirane. Jackson ends by revaluating the masque of Cupid in the light of Busirane's motives, noting that references to phlebotomy in his treatment of Amoret are prefigured in the masque.
In the first of two essays on the Bower of Bliss Christine Coch considers Spenser's imaginary garden in the context of Italianate gardens in the contemporary Roman style that began to appear in England during the Elizabethan era (Coch 2005). These gardens differed from the older formal knot gardens, which were designed to be viewed from above, because they encouraged the visitor to immerse herself in the experience in order to "stimulate particular senses at key moments" and be surprised by "new perspectives" (p. 50). In this original and entertaining essay Coch compares the visitor's experience of these gardens with the act of reading poetry, noting that both move through delights engaging the intellect along the way. Poetry was held in high esteem but it was also denounced as morally suspect and so too was the pleasure garden; as Coch points out, the perception that poetry and pleasure gardens shared definitive characteristics was common. Via detailed descriptions of one of these gardens, the Grove of Diana at the palace of Nonsuch, Coch explains that for Spenser it seems the garden presented the reader with the kind of challenge visitors would encounter at Nonsuch and that Guyon encounters in the Bower of Bliss. The complicated relationship between actual reader, ideal reader and knight is explored in detail by Coch in the light of Guyon's extremes of behaviour in the garden. Throughout the episode Spenser implicitly asks how a reader/visitor might engage with sensual pleasures without compromising their moral integrity.
The second essay from this year's Spenser Studies to focus on Spenser's Bower of Bliss is by Ayesha Ramachandron and considers the relationship between Acrasia's abode and Spenser's poem "Muiopotmos" (Ramachandron 2005). Ramachandron argues that the analogy between the two works is more pervasive than has hitherto been noticed with both episodes concentrating on "the locus amoenus or romance", a "malignant entrapping" figure, and a competition between nature and art (p. 79). But Ramachandron suggests that the differences between the episodes are perhaps more interesting and asks why Spenser returns to the seductive and entrapping romance so effectively destroyed in The Faerie Queene, a clear example of "the triumph of the epic" (p. 79). The answer, suggests Ramachandron, is "an unsettling response to the fate of epic poetics and politics" (p. 97). Spenser associates romance with the guile of the court and specifically female power. His return to romance in "Muiopotmos" signals an important realization: "Epic is no longer the genre defining the politics of empire; it is no match for the guile of romance intrigue" (p. 98).
In a thoughtful piece Rebecca Yearling finds significance in a crux from Book 5, canto 3 of The Faerie Queene usually dismissed by critics as Spenser's mistake (Yearling 2005). It is difficult to understand how the False Florimell can wear Florimell's girdle when the narrator has noted that the garment fits only those who are chaste. As Yearling points out, the notion that Spenser made a mistake by allowing the False Florimell to wear the girdle is unlikely since the poet would hardly forget a point made less than five stanzas earlier. It is more likely, claims Yearling, that Spenser is demonstrating two kinds of chastity: the False Florimell and her partner Braggadocchio are technically chaste but are inferior examples of the virtue when compared to Florimell and Marinell. As is also clear in the two versions of the episode featuring Amoret and Scudamour, chastity is only significant when it is tested and "proved in opposition" (p. 139); for Spenser chastity is not merely a passive state.
In an important essay Steven W. May details a hitherto unknown critic of Spenser, the wealthy gentleman farmer Henry Gurney (May 2005). The Tanner manuscript, discovered in the Bodleian Library by May, reveals Gurney as a poet and critic who was also responsible for lending books and manuscripts to a coterie of friends and relatives among the landed gentry and neighbouring clergymen. The Tanner manuscript contains an inventory of Gurney's library as well as copies of his own prolific literary output (more than 600 poems). Gurney the critic was not an admirer of Spenser's poetry and in his commentaries criticized Spenser's language and poetic form. Henry Gurney was no admirer of Spenser but the same cannot be said of Robert Ellrodt who at times gets uncomfortably close to idolizing the poet: there are references to the genius of his mind, his all-embracing philosophical vision, the poet as aesthetic contemplative (Ellrodt 2005). Ellrodt's main argument is that we can make inferences about the man from his work and that, despite the focus on action and conflict in The Faerie Queene, Spenser favoured "stability and quietude" (p. 7). Much of Ellrodt's evidence is based on his reading of The Faerie Queene and he makes some valuable observations when comparing Spenser's view of love with that expressed by the Platonist, Flaminio Nobili. Nobili might well have influenced Spenser although Ellrodt does mention that, given "the absence of verbal echoes" (p. 10), there is no evidence of direct influence.
James Schiavone demonstrates that an edition of Augustine's Opera by Erasmus was acquired by Pembroke college Cambridge by 1570 and so Spenser would have had access to this ten volume work (Schiavone 2005). In Book 1 of The Faerie Queene, argues Schiavone, Spenser reflects Augustine's belief in free will and predestination. This is not necessarily a paradox, as Schiavone notes he formerly believed, but a distinction between Augustine's early and later beliefs, a distinction emphasized by Erasmus whose edition obviously influenced Spenser. Also interested in Spenser's attitude to religion is Hossein Pirnajmuddin who explores the important distinction made by Spenser between Persia and Islam in The Faerie Queene (Pirnajmuddin 2005). Engaging with Edward Said's study of orientalism, and using a range of examples from the poem, Pirnajmuddin convincingly argues that while Persia is associated with excess and evil figures, it suggests the desirable as well as that which should be rejected. Islam, on the other hand, is always negative. Where Persia is depicted "as a non-Islamic, monarchical land" Islam "represents a contemporary formidable competitor to Christianity" (p161) that must be conquered.
Anthony Miller's focus is Book one of Spenser's Faerie Queene, specifically the episode where Redcrosse is cast into Orgoglio's dungeon (Miller 2005a). As Miller points out, critics have long recognized the parallel drawn between Orgoglio and the power of Spain but argues that the imprisonment of Redcrosse carries specific allusion to the Spanish Inquision as recounted in Foxe's Acts and Monuments. Via detailed analysis of extracts from both works Miller makes a persuasive case for Spenser's debt to Foxe's evocative descriptions of Protestant suffering and the warning to be on one's guard against Catholic persecution. Staying with Spenser's sources, Jason Lawrence's focus is a hitherto unacknowledged allusion to Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata in Book VI of The Faerie Queene (Lawrence 2005). According to Lawrence, Calidore's decision to suspend his quest and stay with the shepherds is a clear echo of Tasso's own pastoral interlude in his poem but, in its use of the image of the stricken ship, also alludes to the poem's dedication to Tasso's patron Alfonso II, the Duke of Ferrara. Lawrence goes on to consider Spenser's use of the stricken ship image in the Amoretti, arguing that Spenser reworks the conceit in order to stress the steadiness of the female pilot, which contrasts with the uncertainty of the male figures presented earlier in his sonnet sequence and in the Petrarchan original.
Moving from influences upon Spenser to his influences upon others, the main focus of Tamara A Goeglein's essay is the English humanist and advocate of Ramist logic Abraham Fraunce who offered strategies for reading emblems (Goeglein 2005). Fraunce was a friend of the Sidneys, benefited from their patronage, and moved in the same literary circles as Edmund Spenser. Fraunce used extracts from the August eclogue of Spenser's Shepheardes Calender in his work The Lawiers Logike in order to illustrate "the logical complexities in the emblematic aesthetic" (p. 230), thus providing us with clues on how emblem books and books of Ramist logic were read by the early moderns, which is Goeglein's main concern. Also concerned with The Shepheardes Calender, D. Allen Carroll revaluates the letters 'E. K.' that occur in Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, suggesting that they might specifically signal a word and help identify the poem's annotator or annotators (Carroll 2005). Tracing the various meanings of the words produced by the sound of the letters, 'eke' (or eek) and ecce, Carroll ponders what is termed "a cluster of verbal clues" (p. 178). These clues point to Spenser's friend Gabriel Harvey and most likely Spenser himself as the annotators.
William A. Oram's essay is a revised version of an invited lecture presented at the annual session on Spenser at Kalamazoo (Oram 2005b). Here Oram continues his valuable work on Spenser's audiences, an important topic because, as Oram points out, it drives Spenser's self presentation in poetry written post 1590 and his understanding of what it means to be a poet. Oram argues that Spenser's desire to become a court poet was frustrated by a less-than-enthusiastic reception at court in 1589-1591. Spenser's anger and frustration is evident in his Complaints, a collection of poems which share an explicitly anti-court stance yet is dedicated to ladies from the court, thus suggesting the court is "an inescapable audience for one's work" (p. 32). In Amoretti and Epithalamion Spenser addresses the love object as audience, a tactic unusual in a genre where focus is usually on the mind of the speaker. But Elizabeth Boyle was not the only audience for Spenser's poem, which is also addressed to a middle-class, rather than courtly, audience. Finally Oram turns his attention to The Faerie Queene, arguing that Spenser's ambivalence about his courtly audience makes the second half of his epic poem very distinct from the first: in the later books the queen's status is undercut and the poet himself takes centre-stage as "a figure of virtue under attack" (p. 40) rather than the devoted courtier seen earlier. Oram includes at the end of his essay an appendix which asks "Who is responsible for Spenser's Complaints?" in which he usefully engages with the lengthy critical controversy surrounding that collection.
Oram also provides a useful introduction to a special volume of the journal Studies in the Literary Imagination which appeared this year. As Oram points out, this volume gives voice to the increasing attention afforded to the front and back matter of the first edition of The Faerie Queene, published in 1590 (Oram 2005a). This attention is in part due to a New Historicist focus on what constitutes a text, what Oram terms "the social embeddedness of literature", and its analysis of "specific reading communities" (p. vii). Drawing upon Gerard Genette's Paratexts, Oram correctly asserts the centrality of that which is usually relegated to the margins. Most of the essays in the volume deal with the dedicatory sonnets and there is a focus on Spenser's biography as well as the meaning of the poems themselves. Toshiyuki Suzuki wonders what can be inferred about Spenser's part in the printing of The Faerie Queene from the page of "Faults escaped" printed at the end of the 1590 edition (Suzuki 2005). Suzuki concludes that Spenser himself rather than a printer probably provided this page and it was set from a manuscript made from authorial corrections. Spenser appears to have had irregular contact with the printing house and although he probably supplied corrections for the second edition of the poem he probably did not proof-read it. Indeed, Spenser might well have been in Ireland when the second edition was published in 1596.
Ty Buckman's focus is on the Letter to Ralegh and the Dedicatory sonnets (Buckman 2005). He argues that the Letter is less Spenser's statement of theoretical position than an effort by the poet to put some distance between his own work and Ralegh's Ocean to Cynthia. Along with the sonnets, it reveals Spenser's didactic purpose and his efforts to distinguish between his own epic (which is moral and abstract) and Ralegh's romancing of the queen. Another of Spenser's contemporaries is of interest to Andrew Zurcher who notes that the positioning of the dedicatory sonnets at the end of the poem and the absence of a dedicatory sonnet to Elizabeth provided Thomas Nashe with much material for satire in Pierce Penniless, his Supplication to the Devil (Zurcher 2005). Nashe presents "a brilliant critique of the printing of The Faerie Queene in 1590 as a publishing event" (p. 177), using the positioning of the poem's front and back matter as ammunition with which to launch an attack on the contemporary culture of literary patronage. Jean Brink compares Spenser's dedicatory sonnets with those of other poets-- amongst them Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton--and argues against Carol A. Stillman's view that Spenser followed a strict order of heraldic rules for precedence in selecting his dedicatees (Brink 2005). Brink suggests that Spenser's sonnets are less dedications than a catalogue of worthies and concludes that "neither the form nor content of Spenser's dedications was dictated by established social conventions" (p. 67) but, rather, conform to Sidney's conception of the poet as creator.
Fritz Levy believes that the beginning of the first edition of the poem signals Spenser announcing himself as a poet laureate (Levy 2005). According to Levy there is a distinct tension between the humble dedication to Elizabeth and the stridently Virgilian nature of the first proem but the latter dominates and "the unconventional distribution of materials" (p. 87) was no accident but, rather, resulted from Spenser's conviction that he had achieved laureate status. In a similar vein, Wayne Erikson considers the apparently humble nature of the dedication to have been manipulated by Spenser (Erickson 2005). Some of the dedications can be read straight, as it were, but others suggest subtle criticism via irony. The tension between humility and aggression is also the subject of Patricia Wareh's essay, which deals with the extent to which Spenser's 'gift' of a dedication was in fact a self-serving act (Wareh 2005). For Spenser, self-deprecation is the means by which he indirectly asserts the value of his poetry.
Thomas Herron concentrates on the Irish context of the sonnets (Herron 2005). Herron argues that the sonnets "celebrate and chastise Spenser's fellow planters and patrons while promising fertile opportunity to anyone who might be tempted to venture west and north across St. George's channel" (p. 133). Oram's description of Herron's essay is misleading when it states that Herron considers the sonnets to "promote a militant pro-Irish policy in Ireland" (p. xvi). As Herron makes clear, the sonnets are not 'pro-Irish' but rather 'pro-Ireland' in celebrating the opportunities afforded by that land at the expense of its indigenous people. Spenser is specifically promoting imperial government and the use of force to those who support or, perhaps more importantly, should support strong English rule in Ireland. Shifting the focus from the margins to the center (in terms of location at least) Judith Owens' essay deals with the fourth commendatory sonnet authored by R. S., which she argues aligns Spenser with mercantile London (Owens 2005). She relates this to Spenser's distinctly ambivalent view of commerce in The Faerie Queene: his view is negative in the Cave of Mammon episode but the opposite is true in the genealogical exchange between Britomart and Paridell. Andrew Wallace, meanwhile, like Zurcher and others in this volume, is concerned with Thomas Nashe's reaction to the dedicatory sonnets (Wallace 2005). Citing Nashe's reaction to the 1590 Faerie Queene Wallace argues that the dedicatory sonnets function as a conclusion to this unfinished narrative poem: they are the poet's last word and thus a substitute for Gloriana's feast that Spenser anticipates will end the twelfth book. This useful volume concludes with an appendix, which, appropriately enough, reproduces the front and back matter from the 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene in the Huntington Library.
The only Notes and Queries piece relating to Spenser that appeared this year was written by this reviewer and considered Spenser's sources for the Munera episode that occurs in Book 5 of The Faerie Queene (Fitzpatrick 2005). Evidence indicates that in the violent death of Munera (FQ 5.2) Spenser was influenced by Shakespeare's depiction of Lavinia and Tamora in Titus Andronicus and by material from a novella related to Shakespeare's play. Munera is a fusion of Shakespeare's women for she is both victim and perpetrator, and the reader is directed to feel sympathy for her suffering and yet satisfaction at her demise. Moors in Bandello's tale and in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus appear to have influenced Spenser's story of Munera. They are responsible for murder and rape or incitement to rape and encourage a male protagonist to chop off his own body part. Details that occur in the tale but are not present in Titus Andronicus are paralleled in Spenser's Munera episode: the bridge over water, the fortified building as a site of violence, and the dropping of a lady's body from that building. Titus Andronicus is a likely source for The Faerie Queene and the sixteenth-century tale which has come down to us in the form of a ballad is also a source for The Faerie Queene.
Books reviewed
Mack 2005
Pugh 2005
Rupp & Doring 2005
Bates, Robin E. 2005. "'The Queene is Defrauded of the Intent of the Law': Spenser's Advocation of Civil Law in A View of the State of Ireland." Papers on Language and Literature 41. 123-45.
Brink, Jean. 2005. "Precedence and Patronage: The Ordering of Spenser's Dedicatory Sonnets (1590)." Studies in the Literary Imagination 38. 51-72.
Buckman, Ty. 2005. "Forcing the Poet Into Prose: 'Gealous Opinions and Misconstructions' and Spenser's Letter to Ralegh." Studies in the Literary Imagination 38. 17-34.
Burlinson, Christopher and Andrew Zurcher. 2005. "'Secretary to the Lord Grey Lord Deputie Here': Edmund Spenser's Irish Papers." Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 6. 30-75.
Campana, Joseph. 2005. "On Not Defending Poetry: Spenser, Suffering, and the Energy of Affect." Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 120. 33-48.
Carroll, D. Allen. 2005. "The Meaning of 'E. K.'." Spenser Studies 20. 169-81.
Carter, Susan. 2005. "Duessa: Spenser's Loathly Lady." Cahiers elisabethains 68. 9-18.
Celovsky, Lisa. 2005. "Early Modern Masculinities and The Faerie Queene." English Literary Renaissance 35. 210-47.
Coatalen, Guillaume. 2005. "'Lo a Timorous Correction': Unrecorded Extracts from Spenser and Harington and Negative Criticism of The Faerie Queene in a Folio from the Bodleian Library." Studies in English Literature 56. 730-48.
Coch, Christine. 2005. "The Trials of Art: Testing Temperance in the Bower of Bliss and Diana's Grove at Nonsuch." Spenser Studies 20. 49-76.
Ellrodt, Robert. 2005. "Fundamental Modes of Thought, Imagination, and Sensibility in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser." Spenser Studies 20. 1-21.
Erickson, Wayne. 2005. "The Poet's Power and the Rhetoric of Humility in Spenser's Dedicatory Sonnets." Studies in the Literary Imagination 38. 91-118.
Fitzpatrick, Joan. 2005. "Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Bandello's Novelle as Sources for the Munera Episode in Spenser's Faerie Queene Book 5 Canto 2." Notes and Queries. n. s. 52. 196-98.
Freeman, Louise Gilbert. 2005. "Vision, Metamorphosis, and the Mutabilitie Cantos." Studies in English Literature 45. 65-93.
Goeglein, Tamara A. 2005. "Reading English Ramist Logic Books as Early Modern Emblem Books: The Case of Abraham Fraunce." Spenser Studies 20. 225-52.
Hamlin, Hannibal. 2005. "'The Highest Matter in the Noblest Forme': The Influence of the Sidney Psalms." Sidney Journal 23. 133-57.
Hecht, Paul J. 2005. "Spenser Out of His Stanza." Style 39. 316-35.
Herron, Thomas. 2005. "Ralegh's Gold: Placing Spenser's Dedicatory Sonnets." Studies in the Literary Imagination 38. 133-47.
Jackson, Emily A. Bernhard. 2005. "'Ah, Who Can Love the Worker of Her Smart':? Anatomy, Religion, and the Puzzle of Amoret's Heart." Spenser Studies 20. 107-35.
Lawrence, Jason. 2005. "Calidore Fra i Pastori: Spenser's Return to Tasso in The Faerie Queene, Book VI." Spenser Studies 20. 265-76.
Levy, Fritz. 2005. "Behind the Back Matter: The Liminalities of The Faerie Queene (1590)." Studies in the Literary Imagination 38. 73-89.
Lobsien, Verena Olejniczak. 2005. "'Transformed in Show, but More Transformed in Mind': Sidney's Old Arcadia and the Performance of Perfection." Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. Edited by Susanne Rupp and Tobias Doring. Amsterdam. Rodopi. 105-17.
Lockwood, Tom. 2005. "New Allusions to Jonson and Sidney." Notes and Queries 52. 227-29.
Maassen, Irmgard. 2005. "Canonized By Love? Religious Rhetoric and Gender-fashioning in the Sonnet." Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. Edited by Susanne Rupp and Tobias Doring. Amsterdam. Rodopi. 169-88.
Mack, Michael. 2005. Sidney's Poetics: Imitating Creation. Washington. The Catholic University of America Press.
May, Steven W. 2005. "Henry Gurney, a Norfolk Farmer, Reads Spenser and Others." Spenser Studies 20. 183-223.
McKeown, Adam. 2005. "Looking at Britomart Looking at Pictures." Studies in English Literature 45. 43-63.
Melehy, Hassan. 2005. "Antiquities of Britain: Spenser's 'Ruines of Time'." Studies in Philology 102. 159-83.
Miller, Anthony. 2005a. "Red Crosse's Imprisonment and Foxe's Inquisition." Spenser Studies 20. 255-63.
Miller, Anthony. 2005b. "The Proem to The Faerie Queene, Book II: Spenser, Pliny, and Undiscovered Worlds." Classical and Modern Literature: A Quarterly 25. 1-7.
Nuttall, A. D. 2005. "Spenser and Elizabethan Alienation." Essays in Criticism 55. 209-25.
Olmstead, Wendy. 2005. "The Gentle Doctor: Renaissance/Reformation Friendship, Rhetoric, and Emotion in Sidney's Old Arcadia." Modern Philology 103. 156-86.
Oram, William A. 2005a. "Introduction: Spenser's Paratexts." Studies in the Literary Imagination 38. vii-xviii.
Oram, William A. 2005b. "Spenser in Search of an Audience: The Kathleen Williams Lecture for 2004." Spenser Studies 20. 23-47.
Owens, Judith. 2005. "Commercial Settings of the 1590 Faerie Queene." Studies in the Literary Imagination 38. 149-242.
Parry, Joseph. 2005. "Petrarch's Mourning, Spenser's Scudamour, and Britomart's Gift of Death." Comparative Literature Studies 42. 24-49.
Perry, Nandra. 2005. "Imitatio and Identity: Thomas Rogers, Philip Sidney, and the Protestant Self." English Literary Renaissance 35. 365-406.
Pirnajmuddin, Hossein. 2005. "The 'Antique Guize': Persia in The Faerie Queene." Spenser Studies 20. 145-67.
Pugh, Syrithe. 2005. Spenser and Ovid. Aldershot. Ashgate.
Quitslund, Beth. 2005. "Teaching us How to Sing?: The Peculiarity of the Sidney Psalter." Sidney Journal 23. 83-110.
Ramachandron, Ayesha. 2005. "Clarion in the Bower of Bliss: Poetry and Politics in Spenser's 'Muiopotmos'." Spenser Studies 20. 77-106.
Rupp, Susanne and Tobias Doring, eds. 2005. Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. Amsterdam. Rodopi.
Schiavone, James. 2005. "Spenser's Augustine." Spenser Studies 20. 277-89.
Steinberg, Glenn A. 2005. "Spenser's Shepheardes Calender and the Elizabethan Reception of Chaucer." English Literary Renaissance 35.1. 31-51.
Suzuki, Toshiyuki. 2005. "A Note on the Errata to the 1590 Quarto of The Faerie Queene." Studies in the Literary Imagination 38. 1-16.
Wallace, Andrew. 2005. "Reading the 1590 Faerie Queene with Thomas Nashe." Studies in the Literary Imagination 38. 35-49.
Wareh, Patricia. 2005. "Humble Presents: Pastoral and Gift Giving in the Commendatory Verses and Dedicatory Sonnets." Studies in the Literary Imagination 38. 119-32.
Wheatley, Chloe. 2005. "Abridging the Antiquitee of Faery Lond: New Paths Through Old Matter in The Faerie Queene." Renaissance Quarterly 58. 857-80.
Wolfe, Jessica. 2005. "Spenser, Homer, and the Mythography of Strife." Renaissance Quarterly 58. 1220-88.
Yearling, Rebecca. 2005. "Florimel's Girdle: Reconfiguring Chastity in The Faerie Queene." Spenser Studies 20. 137-44.
Zurcher, Andrew. 2005. "Getting it Back to Front in 1590: Spenser's Dedications, Nashe's Insinuations, and Ralegh's Equivocations." Studies in the Literary Imagination 38. 173-98.