This collection represents some of the best recent critical writing on Edmund Spenser, a major Renaissance English poet. The essays cover the whole of Spensers work, from early literary experiments such as The Shepeardes Calendar, to his unfinished crowning work,The Fairie Queene. The introduction provides an overview of critical responses to Spenser, setting his work and the debates which it has generated in their perspective contexts: new historicist, post-structural, psychoanalytic and feminist. His study also covers the critical responses of leading British, Irish and American scholars.

General Editor's Preface Acknowledgements. 1. Introduction 2. Barbarous Tongues: The ideology of poetic form (Richard Helgerson) 3. 'The Perfecte Paterne of a Poet': The poetics of courtship in The Shepeardes Calender (Louis Montrose). 4. Spenser's Complaints (Richard Ramuss) 5. Spenser's Poetics: The Poem's two bodies (David Lee Miller). 6. To Fashion a Gentleman: Spenser and the destruction of the Bower of Bliss (Stephen Greenblatt) 7. Singing Unsung Heroines: Androgynous discourse in Book III of the Faerie Queene (Lauren Silberman) 8. 'Endlesse Worke' (Jonathan Goldberg) 9. Praise and Defence of the Queen in The Faerie Queene, Book V (Pamela Joseph Benson) 10. The 'Sacred Hunger of Ambitious Minds: Spenser's savage religion (Andrew Hadfield) 11. The Colonization of Language: Narrative strategies in The Faerie Queene, Book VI (Anne Fogarty) 12. Mapping Mutability: or Spenser's Irish Plot (Julia Reinhard Lupton). Notes on author Further reading Index