Edmund Spenser

This book offers a fresh reading of Spenser's poetry in the light of his Protestantism. Previous critics have devoted much space to the poet's debt to the literature of antiquity and the Renaissance, as well as to his knowledge of Neoplatonism, mythograph, and iconography; but less has been written about the imaginative consequences for his poetry of his Protestantism, largely conditioned by the Elizabethan religious milieu. Dr Hume seeks to illuminate Spenser's major poems, The Shepheardes Calender and The Faerie Queene, by placing them in a relevant context of Elizabethan Protestant thought and writings. Her detailed analysis shows how words, images and episodes in both poems come into focus when the reader takes account of sermons, biblical commentaries, devotional treatises and controversial works of the Elizabethan decades.