2. Sidney

    A number of valuable journal articles on Sidney appeared this year, although there were fewer than in previous years and there were no monographs to consider. Additionally, this year's Sidney Journal was devoted entirely to Philip's younger brother, Robert Sidney.

    In an original and convincing article, Garrett A. Sullivan traces the manner in which Sidney associates sleep with the passions and transformation in The Old Arcadia (2007b). He compares Sidney's text with Plato's Republic, noting that "Many of The Republic's themes--sleep, transformation, erotic desire, government of both self and polity, and indeed tyranny--are crucial for The Old Arcadia" (p. 738-739). In both texts training the body is inseparable from training the mind: it is when one is asleep that the passions might well gain control over the body, but this will only occur in those whose waking behaviour is immoderate. Two characters who sleep in Sidney's romance, Pyrocles and Basilius, are transformed and this transformation is associated with geographical change, which Sullivan argues is typical of Sidney's text, creating what Sullivan terms "a landscape of the passions" (p. 740). From the outset of The Old Arcadia Sidney emphasizes the significance of bodily self-regulation. Sullivan cites early modern dietaries by Andrew Boorde, Thomas Cogan and William Bullein, all of which contain warnings against immoderate sleep, specifically midday sleep: the damage caused by immoderate sleep "is not merely physical, for such sleep is also associated with various forms of sinful, hedonistic behavior, including lust and gluttony" (p. 741). The association of sleep with sin is hinted at in Sidney's representation of Dametas, a sloth-like figure who sleeps on his stomach, a posture considered harmful by the early moderns. Sullivan contends that the genre of romance "flourishes where bodies succumb both to their (sometimes enchanted) environments and to corrupting pleasures or habits--lust, intoxication, indolence, immoderate sleep" (p. 746). Both Sleep and desire are powerful threats to identity, as in the case of Verdant from Book 2 of The Faerie Queene, who lies slumbering with his discarded armour nearby. The most significant example of sleep in The Old Arcadia is that induced by Basilius's consumption of a magical drink. His greedy consumption indicates moral weakness but he is, upon awaking, a wise ruler and thus a powerful example of the transformative power of sleep.

    Tracey Sedinger builds upon the work of recent historians who have indicated that for the early moderns republicanism or a mixed constitution, one that would keep the monarch in check, was considered a viable form of government (2007). The Ciceronian humanism that dominated Tudor humanist political discourse reinforced the acceptability of an advisory body that was compatible with monarchy, specifically a monarchical republic. A Protestantism that perceived England and the monarch as under constant threat only added to the sense that the privy council might be endowed with the crown's authority. Sedinger claims that Philip Sidney's conflicts with the queen--disagreements that centred on his disapproval of her proposed marriage to d'Anjou and her refusal to aid the Protestant rebels in the Netherlands, and thus his military career--led him to consider what a good citizen can do when their monarch refuses to follow good counsel. By examining key episodes from Sidney's New Arcadia, specifically the addition of the helots' revolt, Sedinger traces evidence of a shift in Sidney's attitude towards counsel in the poem's revised version. The Old Arcadia, suggests Sedinger, is an effort to counsel, a kind of position paper and literary intervention into political debates over England's role in the Netherlands. In the New Arcadia the narrator is less intrusive and it becomes a multivocal piece where disengagement or rebellion is the only recourse left to a people who feel that they have no voice.

    Staying with the political ramifications of Sidney's Arcadia, Richard Wood proposes that the New Arcadia is closer to the spirit of Philip Sidney's political philosophy than its predecessor, the Old Arcadia (2007). Wood notes that Sidney's early editor, Fulke Greville, chose to connect the Arcadia with the Essex circle, a prominent faction of the 1590s. Where this emphasized the divisiveness of the romance, as Joel Davis observed, Mary Sidney based her later edition of the text on an anti-factionalist agenda. Wood usefully outlines the distinctions between the two editions and, citing Davis, notes that Greville's editorial practices served to highlight similarities between himself and Sidney, thus casting the poet as a courtier-soldier who rejects the effeminacy of pastoralism for a stoic moral and political philosophy. Via detailed reference to the text Wood suggests that Philip would have been more sympathetic to Mary's focus on factionalism as corruptive and her positioning of its female characters at the very heart of a conciliatory trajectory.

    An essay from this year's Spenser Studies is worth mentioning here. Rebeca Helfer provides a welcome analysis of Spenser's rather neglected poem The Ruines of Time, specifically in its memorial to Philip Sidney (2007). She traces a dialogue within Spenser's work about Cicero's art of memory "that reforms fictions of permanence through a narrative of change, contingency, and continuity" and that venerates Sidney as "the epitome of deathless poetry" (p. 129). Poetry as the art of memory, via the immortal poet, is reinforced by The Ruines of Time, which looks back to Sidney's Defense of Poetry, a work that itself looks back to The Shepheardes Calender. The title of Spenser's later poem locates the work within time and history and thus creates what Helfer terms "a memory theatre" for Sidney and England "which explores how poetry builds and rebuilds immortality from and within the ruins of time" (p. 148).

    There were a few essays on Sidney's sonnet sequence. Focusing on sonnets by Petrarch, Sidney and Spenser, Danijela Kambasković-Sawers argues that the 'sequentiality' of the sonnet sequence is often neglected by critics and detects in this sequentiality a precursor of the novel form (2007). These sonneteers share "the development of a fictive first-person narrative voice based on the self" (p. 637) and this voice is ambiguous. All three sonneteers are, argues Kambasković-Sawers, influenced by Ovid's myths. The first part of the essay is concerned with Petrarch's Il Canzoniere, part two with Sidney's Astrophil and Stella and part three with Spenser's Amoretti. In the section on Sidney, Kambasković-Sawers argues that Sidney uses Petrarchan ambiguous first-person fictionalization via revised Ovidian myth, introspection, and societal observation in order to create meanings that "temper and cancel each other" (p. 648). The sequence thus reveals to the reader Astrophil's "emotional and authorial ambivalence" (p. 649) whereby shifting meanings interrogate gender roles and ethical and social concerns.

    In a rather short piece, Maura Grace Harrington provides a close-reading of Sonnet 59 from Sidney's Astophil and Stella, where the speaker is dismayed that Stella should demonstrate more affection for her dog than for him (2007). As an demonstration of how to read a sonnet this is a readable and engaging essay, with attention given to Sidney's use of alliteration, imagery, and so on, but it amounts to little more than might be expected from a good undergraduate essay. There is no engagement with any criticism on the sonnet form, Sidney's engagement with it, or the use of animals in literature.

    This year's Notes and Queries saw only one piece on Sidney (Coatalen 2007). Noting that Sonnet 69 from Sidney's Astrophil and Stella ("Gone is the winter of my misery / My spring appears") is often considered a source for the opening lines of Shakespeare's Richard III ("Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer'), Coatalen suggests that both are derived from works by Du Bellay, a poet with whom Sidney, and perhaps Shakespeare also, was familiar.

3. Spenser

    Two monographs published this year were devoted entirely to Spenser with two others including one or more chapters on his work. Andrew Zurcher's monograph (2007) is a welcome study that is attentive not only to Spenser's understanding of legal process but his linguistic dexterity and curiosity . In chapter one, that forms the introduction to his book, Zurcher argues that although early modern poets, including Spenser, expected their readers to be alert to the linguistic elements in their verse and regarded this as key to interpretation, editions of Spenser and critical commentary on his works do not return the compliment. Chapter two, "'Pleasing Analysis': Renaissance Hermeneutics, Poetry, and the Law", explores the reading practices into which Spenser's poetry was first received and relates Spenser's own theory of interpretation to that evident in early modern English legal writing and practice, for example his use of precedent, authority and so on. In chapter three, "Results: A Survey of Spenser's Legal Diction", Zurcher provides an overview of Spenser's use of legal diction in all his writings with words divided into subdivisions that discuss legal topics such as 'Feudal Law, Land Tenure, and Real Property', 'Contract, Covenant, and Assumpsit', 'Justice, Mercy, Equity, and Jurisdiction'. This important chapter also includes three lists: the first compares the number of times selected legal terms occur in Spenser, Chaucer, Sidney, Harington, and Fairfax; the next two reveal legal diction shared by The Faerie Queene and A View of the Present State of Ireland (which might prove useful in studies of authorial attribution) and legal diction shared by Spenser's autograph diplomatic letters and The Faerie Queene. It strikes this reviewer that this chapter might usefully be expanded into a dictionary of Spenser's legal language (or the legal language used by Spenser and the others considered in this chapter, where the many words listed might be given a fuller treatment than is possible in a monograph of this kind (this is not a criticism of Zurcher, who noted in his introduction that his work was "an avowedly preliminary" (p. 9) consideration of Spenser's language but a suggestion for how this valuable study might be expanded upon). The next four chapters use the evidence gathered in chapter three to provide thorough readings of the second half of The Faerie Queene: chapter five is entitled "Justice, Equity and Mercy in The Legend of Artegall"; chapter six "Courtesy and Prerogative in The Legend of Sir Calidore" and chapter seven "The Composition of the Work: Managing Power in the Two Cantos of Mutabilite". The study also includes a chapter tracing the influence of Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalamion, "Lyric Opposition in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne", in which Zurcher argues that all three authors were interested in the relation between lyric poetry and contemporary law, legal theory, and legal readers. A minor criticism from this reviewer is that Zurcher included a 'Select Bibliography' when a fuller one would have been welcome.

    Much has already been written about Ireland as a context for the writings of Edmund Spenser and although interest in the topic has waned, perhaps precisely because so much has been written, it has not altogether disappeared. Thomas Herron's monograph on the subject (2007) provides commentary on those aspects of Spenser's Irish context that have not yet been discussed at great length. The study is divided into three parts. Part one considers the subject of colonizing Ireland in English writings, position papers as well as poetry. In chapter three Herron considers the impact of various colonial treatises, by Edward Walshe, Thomas Smith, and Richard Robinson, tracing their rhetorical strategies, with appeals to Roman imperial precedent from Walshe, the first direct appeal to enterprise and colonizing as a business venture from Smith, and the use of biblical providential language from Robinson. In chapter four Herron's focus is the influence Spenser's writings had amongst his fellow planters who had poetic and political aspirations, specifically Ralph Birkenshaw and Parr Lane, two figures who have been hitherto neglected by Spenserians. In part two of the study Herron explores the influence of Virgil's Georgics on Book one of The Faerie Queene and how this text, and English translations of it, shaped Spenser's view of the English colonist as heroic husbandman. Part three identifies an Irish context for some of the characters that populate Spenser's epic, for example the villainous Souldan who appears in Book five and who is usually read as representing the might of Spain, but who Herron argues was likely inspired by a legend closer to home: that of the ancient Irish hero Cúchullain. Herron's study is alert to the work that has gone before him, indeed chapter one is a detailed survey of the criticism on Spenser and Ireland that has preceded this study but it more than a mere survey since Herron engages with the difficult questions critics have posed about Spenser's political views, his religion, and the degree to which he felt alienated in Ireland. This last point is an important one for Herron who argues that previous critics have not recognized the degree to which Spenser set an agenda for the New English around him in Ireland and those further a field who supported the colonial project.

    In a study focusing on Spenser and others (2007), Murray Roston argues that postmodern critics have been too negative in their view that there is an undecidability at the core of every text. The exception to such negativity, argues Roston, is Mikhail Bakhtin who in his theory of the dialogic imagination "defines multiplicity not as a disqualification but as a positive value" (p. x). Yet, as Roston notes, Bakhtin allows this only for the novel, arguing that it reveals two primary forces, the 'centripetal', which reinforces traditional linguistic and cultural patterns, and the 'centrifugal', which challenges or subverts them. Bakhtin is less positive in his view of poetry, the epic, and drama. For Bakhtin poetry is univocal because the poetry is immersed in his or her own language;  the epic is so traditional a form that it does not allow for open-endedness, and drama, especially tragedy, is centripetal, underlining the dominant contemporary ideologue. Roston's study presents a powerful argument against such views which, unfortunately, are all too common in some university English departments, where students are still encouraged to believe, for example, that the dramatic depiction of one bad marriage is typical of its age. Chapters one and two are devoted to Shakespeare's plays, The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet respectively. Chapter four deals with Ben Jonson's Volpone and chapter five John Donne's religious verse. It is chapter three, entitled "Spenser and the Pagan Gods" that will be of most interest to Spenserians. In it Roston argues that, despite efforts by critics to account for numerous religious references in The Faerie Queene, his biblical references "are meager" (p88), whereas there are numerous and overt allusions to classical sources. Unlike many of his contemporaries Spenser did not use classical allusions to present Christian ideas, ideas that were considered vaguely apparent to the pagan unbelievers, nor did he invoke Old Testament figures as "models for contemporary Protestant behavior" (p108). His epic has a religious purpose and he makes use of pagan mythology throughout but, and this is Roston's main point, "there is no attempt to merge those disparate elements" (p. 132). The reason for this, Roston claims, lies in Spenser's divergence from the Catholic notion that observation could provide the observer with truths, as is clear from Chaucer's habit of indicating character via mode of dress. Royston suggests that, for Spenser, wariness and suspicion replaces mere observation. Spenser's refusal to merge the disparate elements of his poem is an example of 'intertextuality', the implanting of one text within another and, argues Roston, it is this hybrid form that makes Spenser's poetry both rich and unique. This is a well written, clearly argued, and admirably researched study that should appeal all early-modern scholars. The only minor criticism from this reviewer is that a list of all the works cited rather than bibliographical endnotes and a selected bibliography would have been welcome. 

    The topic of Christopher Tilmouth's monograph (2007) is the passions and governance over them, specifically literary constructions of self-control and the philosophical and religious ideas that informed this subject between 1580 and 1680. The book begins with a useful survey tracing classical, religious and ethical traditions that informed early modern views about the passions and self-governance: those offered by Socrates and the Stoics, various forms of Aristotelianism, and Calvinism. Chapter two narrows the focus to Spenser's Faerie Queene. The first section considers the depiction of carnality in the poem, beginning with Redcross and his abandonment of Una, which triggers his "complicity with fleshliness" via Duessa (p. 39). Tilmouth traces examples from the poem where Spenser shows "a stabilizing distinction" (p.40) between lust and chaste love, for example in the Garden of Adonis episode, but elsewhere the distinction "proves fractious" (p. 41), as when Amoret, who has been rescued by Chastity, is captured by Lust. Tilmouth argues that in The Faerie Queene the passions are out of control and the negative effects of them are typified not only in lust but also in pity and anger. Perhaps not surprisingly for a book focusing on the passions, Tilmouth moves onto the depiction of temperance in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene in section two of this chapter. He argues that Spenser here presents "a constant flexing of reason in opposition to incessantly rebellious passions" (p. 52) and traces a causal relationship between incontinence and intemperance. Tilmouth also traces Guyon's association with shame, a condition that encourages virtue even though it is not a virtue itself and concludes that Spenser offers the reader "what is primarily a humanist and rationalist vision of self-governance" (p72) even though his heroes sometimes require the support of grace, an element of the poem that is Calvinist. Subsequent chapters include studies of Hamlet, Renaissance tragedy, Augustinian and Aristotelian influences from Herbert to Milton, Hobbes, the Restoration and Libertinism, and Rochester.

    This year's ELR produced a number of excellent essays on Spenser. The dangers of monarchical absolutism that Tracey Sedinger considered in 2007, discussed in the section above on Sidney, is also at the core of Melissa E Sanchez's essay, which considers Book 4 of The Faerie Queene via Book 3 (2007). Sanchez argues that chastity, a virtue applicable to both men and women, was considered an essential attribute by classical and Renaissance thinkers who equated sexual license with imperial tyranny. The altruism that is involved in controlling one's erotic desires is, argues Sanchez, crucial to the friendship of Book 4, which Spenser (following Aristotle, Cicero, and Thomas Elyot) depicts as a model of political allegiance based on love. Sanchez notes that although critics have attended to gender in Spenser's poem they have overlooked "the extent to which female characters . . . represent not only actual women but also political subjects" (p. 252), which allows Spenser to consider issues such as hierarchy and consent in the context of debates surrounding the relationship between monarch and subject. Thomas Elyot, amongst others, described the proper relation between ruler and ruled as a union with the ruler's will curbed by council. Near the beginning of Elizabeth I's reign John Alymer attempted to assuage concerns over a female monarch by reference to the checks and balances of mixed polity, which he, like others, compared to marriage. The second half of Elizabeth's reign saw a move toward what her critics regarded as an absolutist sovereignty and away from a mixed polity based on council and consent. Amongst those alarmed by this development were the Sidney-Essex circle, of whom Spenser was a member, who feared for the future of the nobility and Protestantism. Sanchez argues convincingly that the 1596 Faerie Queene (containing Books 4, 5, and 6 and the incomplete Book 7) "mourns the not so distant past" (p. 255) when those Spenser supported at court could inform policy. For Sanchez, distinctions between the 1590 and 1596 ending for Book 3 is telling: where in the former Scudamour and Amoret merge into an hermaphrodite figure "of mutual desire and devotion" (p.256) this is replaced by Scudamour's suspicion and despair and the continued misery of Amoret. Instead of the union there is a series of erotic tests culminating in the flashback to a rape, which, Sanchez argues, shows "parity and consent" replaced with "hierarchy and conquest" (p. 257). The friendship Amoret and Scudamour apparently exemplify may be no more than a fantasy with Amoret complicit in her own abuse. Sanchez suggests that, for Spenser, Amoret represents the people who have allowed themselves to become the victims of tyranny. In Busirane's masque, Amoret is similarly a passive object and the masque typifies the idolatry and delusion on which tyranny depends.

    Wendy Beth Hyman explores the critical crux that is the Bower of Bliss episode from Book 2 of The Faerie Queene (2007). As Hyman rightly notes, the climactic lyric in the Bower of Bliss episode (beginning "Gather the Rose of loue, whilest yet is time, / Whilest louing thou mayest loued be with equall crime") has been neglected by critics. Hyman is interested in the discrepancy between the lyric's urge to 'seize the day', what she terms a "carpe diem moment" (p. 194), and the Bower as a never-changing place without the presence of decay. She reads this moment as an important link between Books 2 and 3 because the problems of erotic desire evident in the Bower are not eradicated by Guyon but recur in the Garden of Adonis. Hyman considers two other episodes in Book 2, which she argues prefigure what occurs in the Bower of Bliss: the moment when Cymochles confronts Phaedria in canto 6 and the description of the Porter at the entrance to the Bower of Bliss. It is ironic that the flowers should encourage Cymochles to cease his toil since Phaedria "has expended great effort to display a spectacle of false ease" (p. 198); so, far from encouraging Cymochles to relax, this floral display should provoke him to be even more alert. As in the Bower of Bliss episode, there is "an association between lyric and flowers, and the proximity of both of these to the threat of entrapment and even death" (p. 198). So too the Porter, Agdistes, is decked with flowers that symbolize concupiscence. The carp-diem themed song in the Bower of Bliss is the final of three "dangerous and misleading songs" that occur in canto 12. The Bower of Bliss is three times compared to Eden and the narrator is apparently unequivocal in his praise for it, yet the flowers are referred to as corruptive in their abundance. As Hyman points out, there is no reason why Guyon should be told to 'seize the day' because there is no decay in the Bower but that he does so suggests that it is he who introduces death into the Bower and thus "acts not as an exemplar of Temperance, but of Time" (p. 203). In destroying the Bower Guyon unwittingly becomes an agent of the materialism he abhors, which Hyman reads as a kind of rape: he literally 'deflowers' the Bower. The episode suggests the difficult balance to be struck between action, not least the action of the quest, and deliberation, when a thoughtful appraisal of the situation is called for. The Garden of Adonis in Book 3 is apparently sanctified but there are striking similarities between it and the Bower of Bliss, specifically in the depiction of Adonis, that complicate any simplistic dichotomizing.

    Another difficult episode from Book 2 of The Faerie Queene is the focus of Christopher Bond's essay: Guyon's visit to the House of Mammon (2007). Bond builds upon the notion that Guyon's descent into Mammon's cave is analogous to Christ's Harrowing of Hell and argues that its debt to a number of Medieval sources provides real insight to Spenser's theology and his attitude toward his literary predecessors. Bond focuses specifically on William Langland's Vision of Piers Plowman (c. 1365-1386) and the mystery cycles. As Bond notes, critics have tended to focus on connections between Langland's proto-Protestant allegory and Book 1 of The Faerie Queene, which is centred on Holiness. Yet Langland's work includes a lengthy account of Christ's Harrowing of Hell, based on a seventh century Latin apocryphal book of the Bible, the Gospel of Nicodemus and its thirteenth century middle English translation. It is already accepted that Spenser knew Langland but here Bond makes a case for his familiarity also with the mystery cycles, despite their official suppression. Spenser could have seen these plays as a child or young man and they formed an important part of the English cultural memory. It is therefore likely, argues Bond, that Spenser was indebted to three of the four mystery cycles that tell the story of Chris's Harrowing and are, in turn, indebted to the seventh century work and, in at least one case, probably also Langland. One similarity between Spenser and his sources is the conception of Christ as a knight who does battle with forces of the underworld but the most important similarity, argues Bond, is that each of two figures (Guyon and Mammon / Satan and Christ) "believes he knows his own powers and tries to assess the powers of his opponent, and each attempts to outwit the other" (p. 180-181). Critics usually read Guyon as over-confident and thus deserving of his physical collapse but, notes Bond, tend to ignore Mammon's point of view; his arrogance in his belief that he can entrap Guyon; and, crucially, the humour of the episode, which Bond suggests is taken directly from Spenser's sources. Guyon's humanity makes him vulnerable to Mammon but it also empowers him and, as in the sources with Satan and Christ, so Mammon's confidence is undermined and he is outwitted by Guyon. Bond concludes that Spenser's use of his sources in this episode reveals that he was not adverse to combining low humour with high theology even when the episode concerned was deemed a "Popish fiction" (p. 191) by a number of his Protestant contemporaries. It also reveals Spenser's belief that human nature, imbued with the spirit of Christ, might contribute to its own redemption.

    Staying with the influence of older writings upon Spenser, William Kuskin traces what he terms "a textual culture of contingency" (p. 11) whereby sixteenth century works owe a debt to fifteenth century literature culture, a debt usually disavowed by critics who claim for sixteenth century writers a material and intellectual break with the past (2007). Reading the prefaces to Spenser's 1579 Shepheardes Calender and Thomas Speght's 1598 Works of Chaucer against John Lydgate's Fall of Princes Kuskin argues that authority is presented via literary precedent. In The Shepheardes Calender E. K. cites Lydgate, a poet who is keen to underline his links with the literary past and who writes in a distinctly Chaucerian style. In Speght's edition of Chaucer the reader is offered not only Chaucer's works but those by other fifteenth century poets, Speght's own work and that of other sixteenth century writers. As Kuskin points out, literary history does not develop in a linear fashion but, rather, emerges from the past by engaging with it.

    Kreg Segall suggests that in Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar a dominant theme is anxiety over the meaning of the poet (2007). Although critics have considered what Segall terms "the nature of Colin's fractured self" (p. 29), by reference to Spenser's shifting relationship to Virgil and debates surrounding the pastoral and age versus youth, Segall traces the poet's identity via comparison with John Skelton, another "equally anxious self-created poet" (p. 29). The poet as a marginal figure is a concern of both Skelton and Spenser and the pastoral genre. Segall argues that both poets create poetic figures onto which they can project, or into which they can locate, their own problematic selves within their own poetry. This explains Spenser's affinity with Skelton and his 'Collyn Cloute' from whom Spenser's poetic figures derives. Segall traces the problems faced by Skelton and Spenser in trying to accommodate the public and private aspects of the role of poet since both "alternately seek to embrace and to break free of the 'poetic vocation' and so do their author figures" (p. 37). Spenser's debt to Skelton is to represent the poet figure within a fractured and multivocal text. Segall traces Colin's development throughout the poem: he seems to become disgusted with himself as a character in "January"; is absent in "October", "April" and "August"; performs for payment in November, and finally, his poetic voice is strongest in December, just before it is silenced.

    James Holstun concentrates on John Heywood's interlude Of Gentylnes and Nobylyte (ca. 1525) and the episode from Book 5, canto 2 of The Faerie Queene featuring Artegall and the giant (2007). Holstun is interested in what these texts can tell us about the estates debate, "a literary encounter between nobility, clergy, and commoners aimed at establishing the proper place and function of each" (p. 335). He argues convincingly that Spenser's poem in general reveals his desire to end debate, which is evident in his knights answering any debate, metaphorical or verbal, "with literal assault and battery" (p. 337), thus invoking the word's origins in battere, 'to beat, knock'. Indeed the debates, by which individuals test institutions, are replaced by trials where the opposite is true. Holstun argues that the episode featuring Munera and Pollente in Book 5 of The Faerie Queene informs the subsequent one featuring Artegall and the Giant. Munera suggests the wealth of the Church and Pollente that of the secular power of the state, specifically poll tax and decapitation; the death of the tyrant and his daughter evokes the mid-Tudor commonwealth tradition with its sympathy for the poor and attacks on those who oppress them. The spirit of this episode is contradicted by the next episode where the people denounce their oppressors in a gathering that resembles the Irish and ancient English folk-motes. Artegall debates with the Giant but the arguments of the former prove contradictory and their debate is ended by a literal attack upon the Giant by Talus. The people defended indirectly in the Pollente and Munera episode are conveniently turned into a rebellious rout and "can be killed with heroic good conscience" (p. 343) since their desire to hold onto some of their wealth, via the Giant, has become a lust for riches.

    In an important contribution to the study of Spenser, Benjamin P. Myers builds upon previous criticism on gender and Ireland by arguing that there is a significant yet hitherto overlooked connection between Spenser's engagement with gender, the Irish landscape, and Petrarchanism (2007). A key concept for Myers is 'frowardness' whereby Spenser's portrayal of the queen as a Petrarchan lady who frowardly refuses to accept her lover is related to the frowardness of the queen in refusing to properly fund the Irish wars. Spenser presents an anti-Petrarchan critique, argues Myers, in which he privileges marriage over ""the danger of a frozen virginity" (p. 232), as evident in the episode featuring Britomart by the sea's edge. The problem of Elizabeth's refusal to take a husband parallels the problem of a land without husbandry: her frustrating refusal to marry is part of the same froward urge that marks her refusal to spend money in the Irish wars. The knights who fight frowardness in all forms throughout Spenser's poem, 'The Order of the Knights of the Maidenhead', indicate the link between sexual conquest and actual conquest with "a masculinist ethic of frowardness that endorses both versions of conquest as it reiterates the Protestant commitment to action in the world" (p. 237). In Book 5, Arthur's liberation of Belge reveals the benefits of decisive military action while Flourdelis' rejection of her king, "with all the pride of a Petrarchan mistress", reveals that "Political allegiance and sexual allegiance . . . adhere to the same code of ethics" (p. 246). Both these episodes lead to the liberation of Irena (Ireland) where the sexualized image of a female land awaiting the male conqueror reinforces the fusion between sexual and colonial conquest.

    David Scott Wilson-Okamura discusses the rather neglected topic of Spenser's use of rhyme (2007). He begins by pondering why Spenser chose to use so many feminine rhymes in the second part of The Faerie Queene published in 1596. He notes that feminine rhymes are often associated with comic effect, as in Marlowe's Hero and Leander, and some of the examples from Spenser fall into that category but it does not fully explain what is going on. Citing Maureen Quilligan he argues that the use of feminine rhymes can be read as comments on gender but the examples discussed by Quillian account for only a fraction of those used by Spenser. For Wilson-Okamura the key lies in considering how feminine rhyme was discussed in the period and what it was used for. It seems that in the 1590s many poets were moving away from feminine rhymes so why did Spenser use more? Wilson-Okamura argues that Spenser was less influenced by the fashions adopted by his fellow-poets than by his reading, specifically his reading of vernacular poetry from Italy and France. Spenser's debt to the Italian Tasso is referred to but detailed analysis is given to Spenser's use of Du Bellay because although, as Wilson-Okamura puts it, the former "would have softened him on feminine rhyme, but nothing more" (p. 360), Du Bellay inspired him to use a specific kind of feminine rhyme known as rime léonine, an exaggerated form of rime riche.

    Moving from rhyme to language, Daniel Fried considers the significance of the name 'Calepine', the knight who appears in Book 6 of The Faerie Queene (2007). As Fried points out, names are telling in Spenser's epic poem and Spenserians are keen to engage meanings they can tease from the text, but Calepine has hitherto received less attention in this regard that the poem's other heroes. Fried argues that the name would have been well-known to a sixteenth century reader because it is the Anglicized name of Ambrogio Calepino, editor of the first and most popular early modern polyglot dictionary. The lexicographical associations are important, argues Fried, since the character Calepine "highlights a concern for the semiotics of personhood, which has broader implications for understanding literati experiences of the patronage systems in which they operated" (p. 230). Fried provides a detailed analysis of the role of Calepion's dictionary in early modern culture before turning back to Book 6 of Spenser's poem and the poet's choice of the name 'Calepine'. Fried notes that Book 6 is "permeated by questions of linguistics and lexicography, arrayed about the central tension: how ought one to understand the true meaning of 'courtesy'?" (p. 237). According to Fried, courtesy is the only virtue that is "fundamentally semiotic" (p. 237) and this is crucial in terms of patronage in a way that holiness, temperance and chastity are not. Whilst the other virtues are internalized, and recognized by God, courtesy is displayed; in order to benefit from patronage one must know how to present the correct signs and thus encourage the proper reading of those signs by others.

    Spenser's shorter poems also received some attention this year. M. L. Stapleton traces Spenser's efforts to reconcile the erotic and earthly with the sacred throughout his career but specifically in his late sonnets (2007). Spenser's debt to Ovid's Metamorphoses has been recognized by critics but, as Stapleton points out, little has been made of his debt to Ovid's Amores, the most important model for the Renaissance sonnet sequence. Stapleton considers the ironic distance between author and speaker in Ovid and Spenser and concludes that the Amoretti persona is most like that in Ovid's Amores since both are unreliable and given to self-delusion (p. 279). Similarly, Spenser's lover, like Ovid's, criticizes himself for finding fault with his lady and Spenser "seems all too aware of the foolishness of the Ovidian lover" (p. 284). For Spenser, Ovidian lust becomes honest desire but it is important "to avoid compulsive fornications" (p. 285) as in the episode that takes place in Castle Joyeous in Book 3 of The Faerie Queene, although Malecasta's erotic escorts, amongst them 'Gardante' (gazing), 'Iocante' (playing), 'Basciante' ('kissing), "could serve as outline for the sacred courtship and marriage" that he outlines in his sonnet sequences (p. 286-287). The attempt to distinguish between sacred and profane love in the Amoretti does not quite work and both processes are informed by desire but where Ovid stresses "the adulterous pagan ethos" Spenser's focus is on "the One Flesh model of Christian marriage" (p. 298).

        As noted in the Sidney section, above, Kambasković-Sawers's essay on the 'sequentiality' of the sonnet sequence as a precursor of the novel form included sections on Petrarch, Sidney, and Spenser (2007). In the section on Spenser, Kambasković-Sawers argues that Spenser's sonnet sequence is different from its predecessors in that it celebrates marriage and not "the traditionally Petrarchan poetics of permanent frustration" (p. 655); the sequence has two readers: Elizabeth Boyle (Spenser's betrothed) and the wider audience. The reader is aware of a growing sense of expectation and also of voyeurism as the wider audience read what was meant for one pair of eyes only. As Kambasković-Sawers points out, this challenges not only the reader's ethical views but his or her preconceived notions of genre. The figure of Cupid is elided with the speaker and his "various guises project the conflicting nature of the speaker's desire" (p. 656) whereby the speaker becomes morally ambiguous and the wider audience more fully immersed in the story. Drawing upon Ovidian mythical examples, Kambasković-Sawers shows how the speaker shifts from frustration to admiration for the lady and sexuality is explored in the context of power before a conclusion where the lady is won but the reader is left eager for the denouement that will be found in the Epithalamion.

    Judith Owens is concerned with the relationship between the heroic and the commercial in Spenser's Prothalamion (2007a). Owen's focus is the poem's refrain "Against the Brydale day which is not long: / Sweet Themmes runne softly  till I end my song", which she argues is a call for the busy London streets--full of noise and commerce--to become silent. Spenser's reference in the poem to the "siluer streaming Themmes" provokes associations between silver and alchemy and also commerce: the silver to be gained from expeditions such as that in Cadiz, from which Essex benefited. Owens states that in the Prothalamion "this mercenary potential of 'siluer streaming' [is] transmuted into quite another register, one provided by . . . alchemical imagery in the poem" (p. 87), which provides analogy for the poetic imagination. Spenser distinguishes between what he regards as the real alchemy of poetry on the one hand and the false promises of alchemical experience and commerce on the other. It is not the case, argues Owens, that Spenser denies the necessity of money or commerce but that he objects to "the conflation of honour with monetary or commercial gain" (p. 88), a point developed also in the Mammon episode from Book 2 of The Faerie Queene. In the Prothalamion Spenser presents Essex as a heroic knight but only by denying the commercial and mercenary concerns with which he was connected by the expedition to Cadiz.

    This year's Spenser Studies is a special volume consisting of selected papers from the conference 'Spenser's Civilizations' held in Toronto in May 2006.  As the editors of the volume point out (Galbraith & Krier 2007), the collection reveals a "focus on conditions of embodiment, the energies of bodily life, affect and sympathy and less emphasis on the love poetry, eros, and gender politics than in earlier Spenser scholarship" (p. 1). Also notable is the shift away from Spenser and Ireland, a dominant issue for Spenserians in the 1990s and the early part of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The Faerie Queene, of course, remains of key interest but the elegiac poems too receive attention. Also apparent is a renewed interest in rhetoric and ethics.

    Paul Stevens considers the role Protestantism, and specifically its engagement with grace, played in British imperial expansion (2007). Via the analysis of empire made by Joseph Schumpeter and David Armitage he argues that Spenser's view of empire is not spacial but temporal and is driven by a culture's desire for its own permanence. Judith Owens' focus is the Ruddymane episode in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene (2007b). As Owens points out, the usual interest for critics who consider this episode is the significance of the bloody hands of Ruddymane, the baby left orphaned by Acrasia, but Owens' explores the following neglected facts: that Guyon becomes the executor of Amavia's will and that he establishes terms of wardship for the baby when he places him in Medina's care. For Owens the episode indicates the significance of family and memorializing in early modern culture and how wardship was considered crucial to the effective maintenance of the commonwealth.

    Richard A. McCabe considers the theme of friendship in a number of works that explore the delicate relationship between poet and patron (2007). The tension between the patron as friend in an idealized relationship and the patron as a figure to whom the poet was obligated is considered in works by Harvey, Churchyard, and Ralegh, as well as Spenser's Faerie Queene. In the proem to Book 4 of Spenser's poem McCabe detects a debt to Horace in Spenser's efforts to ingratiate himself with Elizabeth having fallen out with her secretary of state, and favourite, Burghley. James M. Nohrnberg reads some episodes from Spenser's Faerie Queene and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream against important early modern political events (2007). He draws parallels between Malecasta's attempts to seduce Britomart in Book 3 and the activities of Mary Stuart and the Northern rebels, both of which threatened Protestant rule, while the episode featuring Busirane and Amoret, also from Book 3, is compared to Queen Elizabeth's feelings about her possible marriage to the French Duke of Alençon. 

    Gordon Teskey's focus is on Spenser's poetic thinking in The Faerie Queene--his creative process, his use of the past and so on--and he interrogates what this can tell us about Spenser's allegory (2007). Teskey considers philosophical views on thinking and poetry and what previous readers and critics, including C.S. Lewis, have had to say about Spenser's epic. Moments from the poem considered in detail by Teskey include the Castle of Medina in Book 2 and the Mutabilitie Cantos. As noted in the Sidney section, above, Rebeca Helfer's essay provides a welcome analysis of Spenser's rather neglected poem The Ruines of Time, specifically in its memorial to Philip Sidney (2007). She traces a dialogue within Spenser's work about Cicero's art of memory "that reforms fictions of permanence through a narrative of change, contingency, and continuity" and that venerates Sidney as "the epitome of deathless poetry" (p. 129). Poetry as the art of memory, via the immortal poet, is reinforced by The Ruines of Time which looks back to Sidney's Defense of Poetry, a work that itself looks back to The Shepheardes Calender. The title of Spenser's later poem locates the work within time and history and thus creates what Helfer terms "a memory theatre" for Sidney and England "which explores how poetry builds and rebuilds immortality from and within the ruins of time" (p. 148). 

    Andrew Wallace argues convincingly that the spirit of E. K., the commentator who is a dominant presence in Spenser's pastoral poems, is evident in Spenser's Faerie Queene (2007). E. K.'s influence can be found, argues Wallace, in the repeated encounters between the curious and puzzled observer or interpreter and the bewildering spectacle or work of art, a process clearly evident in the House of Busirane episode from Book 3 of Spenser's epic poem. Busirane also comes up in Lindsay Ann Reid's essay on the influence of Ovid upon Spenser's depiction of this enchanter in Book 3 of The Faerie Queene (2007). She argues that in this episode there are three Ovidian voices that interpret the narrative: those of Paridell, Busirane and the narrator. Reid acknowledges the influence of Lauren Silberman in reading the Busirane episode as "a battle of interpretation" (p. 172), arguing that interpretations of Busiraine and Paridell can be read via Ovid's story of Arachne and Minerva. Paridell lacks Arachne's "critical sensibility and sense of irony" (p.174) and Busiraine, who like Arachne creates a work of art, "does not share in Arachne's critique of divine eros" (p. 177) and does not problematize lust. The narrator, argues Reid, is a truly Ovidian creature, where parody dominates and the irony that escapes both Paridell and Busirane is used "to deflate and critique" (p. 181) their interpretations.

    Andrew Escobedo investigates the distinction between 'will' and 'choice' in The Faerie Queene, specifically what it means to state that a character 'wills' but does not 'choose' something (2007). Tracing the views of many critics, he considers how far allegory and personification exert a constraining or deadening pressure on the poem's characters. Focusing on the episode that takes place in Busirane's castle (an episode that has been of interest to quite a few Spenserians this year) he notes that here "Spenser's characters express their wills . . . deliberately and voluntarily, without exactly choosing" (p. 221). Possession by something, for example love, or by a divine force "compromises our volition's independence" but does not kill it and "can serve as the basis of immensely powerful exertions of the will" (p. 221), as in the case of Britomart where although she is not free of the allegory of love she can will it to positive ends and thus undermine the destructive impulse of Busirane.

    Of particular interest in this year's volume of Spenser Studies were several essays with a focus on ecology, an area that has remained relatively neglected by Spenserians. The influence of Virgil's Georgics on Book 1 of Spenser's Faerie Queene and A View of the Present State of Ireland is the topic of Linda Gregerson's essay (2007). Gregerson considers Spenser's debt to Virgil in his contemplation of a conundrum: "the difficult ethics of habitation in a household or oikos built on earth" (p. 186), specifically whether human beings should co-exist peacefully with nature or impose upon it their will, the latter following the biblical concept of natural 'rule'. To impose human will is an act of violence but it is one that Spenser seems to endorse in the View where "Irenius is unblinking about those violent impositions he construes as necessary to the work of civilization" (p. 189). In Book 1, Redcross's name 'Georgos' signifies the ploughman's labour and he is "taught to think ecologically" (p. 197), that is he is trained in "the system-thinking of intricately balanced interdependent obligations and imperatives" (p. 198). For both Virgil and Spenser, human beings are stewards of the earth but human will must not reign unchecked.

    A focus on the relationship between humans and animals emerged in a few essays. Elizabeth Jane Bellamy's piece considers how The Faerie Queene relates to classical, early modern and modern views of human-animal difference (2007). Bellamy begins by tracing the history of philosophical thinking in this area: Aristotle saw kinship between the human and animal but Descartes saw the animal as a machine and Heidegger's 'theoretical biology' was "the most notorious effort to separate the animal from the human" (p. 228). Heidegger's assertion, in his 1929-30 Freiburg lectures on biology, that animals have no consciousness or selfhood was anticipated by William Perkins' A Discourse of Conscience (1596) in which he noted that because animals "want true reason, they want conscience also".  Heidegger rarely considers mammals but focuses on insects and thus, argues Bellamy, his lectures "can provide a useful backdrop for probing the mysteries of Spenser's insect worlds" (p. 229). Via reference to Spenser's early poem Virgil's Gnat, Bellamy explores the pastoral gnat-simile of the Errour episode from Book 1 of The Faerie Queene where the monster's young swarming around Redcrosse's legs are compared to gnats. Heidegger denied the possibility that animals were capable of what he termed 'world-forming' abilities. For Heidegger all animals, including insects, were "dazed, stupefied, 'benumbed . . . capable of 'perishing,' but never of attaining a state of 'being-toward-death" (p. 230). However for Spenser, argues Bellamy, the gnats and flies of his similes provide his readers "with tantalizing naturalist glimpses into the realities of insect experience, an interest for its own sake in what insects do" (p. 235). In effect, they become more than a mere source of annoyance, their "marred murmurings" causing the reader to question whether they inhabit a state beyond the 'benumbed'.

    Elizabeth D. Harvey considers John Donne's debt to Spenser in Donne's fragmentary poem Metempsychosis, or The Progress of the Soul, but of specific interest to Spenserians is her focus on Spenser's representation of the soul in the Castle of Alma, from Book 2 of The Faerie Queene (2007). Harvey traces early modern attitudes to the soul including the doctrine of reincarnation, which raises difficult questions about relations between humans and animals such as "if the rational soul is unique to human beings, can it be translated into a vegetable or animal body?" and if it is translated "does it retain memory and consciousness of its earlier life but without the power to articulate it" (p. 259-260). Part 3 of Harvey's essay concentrates on the Castle of Alma, an important source for Donne, and she here argues that Spenser's depiction of the soul is influenced by Platonic psychology, specifically in his Timaeus, but is Aristotelian in some respects, specifically "in its insistence on the geometrical expression of the soul's immortal dimension and on the moral governance of the appetitive souls" (p. 272). The episode featuring Grill (or Grylle), the man-turned-pig in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene is also of interest to Harvey since it is "the most dramatic encounter of the animal-human interface" (p. 274) and engages with many of the questions raised by Renaissance debates about the soul and its relation to the animal and human.

    Joseph Loewenstein argues that Spenser is not really interested in animals but that there are moments in The Faerie Queene revealing kinship between certain humans and certain animals (2007). The moments considered are those involving Grylle in Book 2 of the poem and the Lion that attends to Una in Book 1. Loewenstein focuses on the pig as a philosophical totem and points to Plutarch's Moralia and his unfinished Beasts are Rational, otherwise known as the Gryllus, a dialogue that comes up late in the Moralia. This work of philosophical skepticism performs two critical functions: the denigration of human reason and insistence on the animal nature of the human. Loewenstein notes that the disputes provoked by Renaissance skepticism were once notorious; amongst the more notable is Gassendi's argument in his Meditations that animals think and Montaigne's comments on the dignity of animals in The Apology for Raymond Sebond, which was influenced by Plutarch; in both texts the possibility is raised that animal intelligence is superior to human intelligence. Montaigne tells an anecdote from Diogenes Laertius about a superior pig who, unlike the humans around him, was unconcerned about a storm raging around him. The serenity of the pig "models ataraxia, the tranquility of skeptical indifference" and is "the product of that philosophical discipline which leads to epoche, or suspension of judgment" (p. 249). Also relevant to Spenser's Grylle is Gianbattista Gelli's Circe, which adds to the Gryllus by having dialogues between Ulysses and several animals. In the episode featuring Guyon and Grylle, Spenser seems to follow Plutarch and Gelli by asserting human-animal differentiation but his innovation is to silence the men who have become beasts and thus focus on human-animal continuity. Moving on to Una's lion, Loewenstein argues that this episode "depends on the skeptical principle of species continuity, of a fellow-feeling almost inconceivable, given the apparent alterity of animals" (p. 252). It is such fellow-feeling that Guyon lacks as he makes his way through Acrasia's Bower. 

    This year's volume of Spenser Studies is concluded by Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. who draws upon his experiences teaching Shakespeare and Spenser to consider how each differs in his conception of the human (2007a). Focusing on Book 2 of Spenser's Faerie Queene, Sullivan notes that Shakespeare is a poet of subjectivity but Spenser "tends to approach the question of what it is to be human from the perspective of the vitality of all forms of life" (p. 283). Sullivan provides two examples, both involving sleep: the blurring between man and beast that occurs during Guyon's sleep and the indeterminacy evident in the description of the sleeping Verdant "who exists at the intersection of the animal, vegetable and human" (p. 284). Sullivan concludes that where Shakespeare might be considered to have invented the human, Spenser is responsible for problematizing it.

    There was only one article on Spenser in this year's Notes and Queries. Tom MacFaul traces Spenser's influence upon Donne in 2007. He argues that Donne's poem "The Sunne Rising" is indebted to Spenser's "Epithalamion" since both share the theme of comparing marriage to the culture of the court. Both see "an intruder in the bedroom" (p. 3) and for Spenser this is the feminine figure of Cynthia, signifying the moon but also Elizabeth I, rather than the masculine sun who for Donne represents King James. Although the gender of the intruder is not the same both poems, according to MacFaul, share a sense of privacy invaded by royal power.

Bond, Christopher. 2007. "Medieval Harrowings of Hell and Spenser's House of Mammon." English Literary Renaissance 37. 175-92.

Coatalen, Guillaume. 2007. "Shakespeare, Sidney and Du Bellay's Winters." Notes and Queries 252 (N.s. 54). 265.

Escobedo, Andrew. 2007. "Daemon Lovers: Will, Personification, and Character." Spenser Studies 22. 203-26.

Fried, Daniel. 2007. "Defining Courtesy: Spenser, Calepine and Renaissance Lexicography." Review of English Studies 58. 229-24.

Galbraith, David and Theresa Krier. 2007. "Spenser's Book of Living." Spenser Studies 22. 1-4.

Gregerson, Linda. 2007. "Spenser's Georgic: Violence and the Gift of Place." Spenser Studies 22. 185-202.

Harrington, Maura Grace. 2007. "Astrophil the Super Dog: Sidney's Astrophil and Stella." Explicator 65. 130-33.

Harvey, Elizabeth D. 2007. "Nomadic Souls: Pythagoras, Spenser, Donne." Spenser Studies 22. 257-79.

Helfer, Rebeca. 2007. "Remembering Sidney, Remembering Spenser: The Art of Memory and The Ruines of Time." Spenser Studies 22. 127-52.

Herron, Thomas. 2007. Spenser's Irish Work: Poetry Plantation and Colonial Reformation. Aldershot. Ashgate.

Holstun, James. 2007. "The Giant's Faction: Spenser, Heywood and the Mid-Tudor Crisis." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37. 335-71.

Hyman, Wendy Beth. 2007. "Seizing Flowers in Spenser's Bower and Garden." English Literary Renaissance 37. 193-214.

Kambaskovic-Sawers. 2007. "'Never Was I the Golden Cloud': Ovidian Myth, Ambigious Speaker and the Narrative in the Sonnet Sequences By Petrarch, Sidney and Spenser." Renaissance Studies 21. 637-61.

Kuskin, William. 2007. "'The Loadstarre of the English Language': Spenser's Shepheardes Calender and the Construction of Modernity." Textual Cultures 2.2. 9-33.

Loewenstein, Joseph. 2007. "Gryll's Hoggish Mind." Spenser Studies 22. 243-56.

MacFaul, Tom. 2007. "Donne's 'The Sunne Rising' and Spenser's 'Epithalamion'." Notes and Queries 54. 37-38.

McCabe, Richard A. 2007. "'Thine Owne Nations Frend /And Patrone': The Rhetoric of Petition in Harvey and Spenser." Spenser Studies 22. 47-72.

Myers, Benjamin P. 2007. " Pro-War and Prothalamion: Queen, Colony, and Somatic Metaphor Among Spenser's 'Knights of the Maidenhead'." English Literary Renaissance 37. 215-49.

Nohrnberg, James. 2007. "Alencon's Dream / Dido's Tomb: Some Shakespearean Music and a Spenserian Muse." Spenser Studies 22. 73-102.

Owens, Judith. 2007a. "Commerce and Cadiz in Spenser's Prothalamion." Studies in English Literature 1. 79-106.

Owens, Judith. 2007b. "Memory Works in The Faerie Queene." Spenser Studies 22. 27-45.

Reid, Lindsay Ann. 2007. "Certamen, Interpretation, and Ovidian Narration in The Faerie Queene III.ix-xii." Spenser Studies 22. 171-84.

Roston, Murray. 2007. Tradition and Subversion in Renaissance Literature. Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies. Pittsburgh. Duquesne University Press.

Sanchez, Melissa E. 2007. "Fantasies of Friendship in The Faerie Queene, Book IV." English Literary Renaissance 37. 250-73.

Sedinger, Tracey. 2007. "Sidney's New Arcadia and the Decay of Protestant Republicanism." Studies in English Literature 47. 57-77.

Segall, Kreg. 2007. "Skeltonic Anxiety and Rumination in The Shepheardes Calender." Studies in English Literature 47. 29-56.

Stapleton, M. L. 2007. "Devoid of Guilty Shame: Ovidian Tendencies in Spenser's Erotic Poetry." Modern Philology 105. 271-99.

Stevens, Paul. 2007. "Spenser and the End of British Empire." Spenser Studies 22. 5-26.

Sullivan Jr, Garrett A. 2007a. "Afterword." Spenser Studies 22. 281-87.

Sullivan Jr, Garrett A. 2007b. "Romance, Sleep, and the Passions in Sir Philip Sidney's The Old Arcadia." English Literary History 74. 735-57.

Teskey, Gordon. 2007. "Thinking Moments in The Faerie Queene." Spenser Studies 22. 103-26.

Tilmouth, Christopher. 2007. Passion's Triumph Over Reason: A History of the Moral Imagination from Spenser to Rochester. Oxford. Oxford University Press.

Wallace, Andrew. 2007. "Edmund Spenser and the Place of Commentary." Spenser Studies 22. 153-70.

Wilson-Okamura, David Scott. 2007. "The French Aesthetic of Spenser's Feminine Rhyme." Modern Language Quarterly 68. 345-62.

Wood, Richard. 2007. "'The Representing of so Strange a Power in Love: Philip Sidney's Legacy of Anti-factionalism." Online. Internet. Homepage: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/emlshome.html. Early Modern Literary Studies 13.2. para. 1-21.

Zurcher, Andrew. 2007. Spenser's Legal Language: Law and Poetry in Early Modern England. Studies in Renaissance Literature. Cambridge. D. S. Brewer.