About this Journal

The Spenser Review is an online journal published three times each year, supported by the International Spenser Society. The Review publishes book reviews, essay-reviews and writing of various kinds on topics in and around the work of Edmund Spenser. The writing that appears in the journal ranges from historically and textually focused scholarship to a wide array of theoretical, experimental, collaborative, exploratory, and playful forms of writing. The mission of the journal is to complement, reflect and provoke exciting work being undertaken on (and adjacent to) Spenser's writings, and the changing intellectual, pedagogical, cultural and institutional structures in which they are read.

In 2023 The Spenser Review moved to its new online home, hosted by Janeway Systems. This transitional period in the journal's existence is being overseen by an editorial collective comprising the officers of the International Spenser Society and the editors of Spenser Studies, assisted by a newly constituted editorial board and a new Managing Editor. 

The Spenser Review was founded in 1969–70 by Elizabeth Bieman and A. Kent Hieatt, and was originally published from the University of Western Ontario, with the endorsement of the Renaissance Society of America. Until 2001 its title was Spenser Newsletter. In 2008, Sheila Cavanagh at Emory University and David Lee Miller at the University of South Carolina saw the journal from print to digital publication. In 2013, the International Spenser Society restructured the journal’s management and format, and it has continued to develop under subsequent editors, becoming a widely recognized hub for a wide variety of Spenserian engagements.

  • Volume 53 • Issue 2 • 2023 • Not the Faerie Queene

    Volume 53 • Issue 2 • 2023 • Not the Faerie Queene


Guest edited by Claire Falck and Victoria Florio Pipas

Article


"Not the Faerie Queene": Letter from the Editors

"Not the Faerie Queene": Letter from the Editors

Claire Falck and Victoria Florio Pipas

2023-09-30 Volume 53 • Issue 2 • 2023 • Not the Faerie Queene

“Looke backe, who list”: Reassessing the 1611 Folio Text of Complaints

“Looke backe, who list”: Reassessing the 1611 Folio Text of Complaints

Elisabeth Chaghafi and Richard Danson Brown

2023-09-30 Volume 53 • Issue 2 • 2023 • Not the Faerie Queene

Unspeakable Pastoral

Unspeakable Pastoral

Jessica Beckman

2023-09-30 Volume 53 • Issue 2 • 2023 • Not the Faerie Queene

A Little Love? Remembering the Amoretti, Forgetting The Faerie Queene

A Little Love? Remembering the Amoretti, Forgetting The Faerie Queene

Rebeca Helfer

2023-09-30 Volume 53 • Issue 2 • 2023 • Not the Faerie Queene

“Endlesse Moniment”: Elizabeth Boyle, Funerary Monuments, and the Easter Message of Amoretti

Thomas Herron

2023-09-30 Volume 53 • Issue 2 • 2023 • Not the Faerie Queene

The Lab and the Library: An Introduction to the EarlyPrint Project

Craig A Berry

2023-09-30 Volume 53 • Issue 2 • 2023 • Not the Faerie Queene

John Guillory, Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study

Andrew Hadfield

2023-09-30 Volume 53 • Issue 2 • 2023 • Not the Faerie Queene

Mutability and Mystery: Tracing Figurations of Nature in Edmund Spenser’s Two Cantos of Mutabilitie and Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum

Morgan Souza

2023-09-30 Volume 53 • Issue 2 • 2023 • Not the Faerie Queene

Poetics of the Abbreviated Sequel as Personalized Rebuttal: Reflections on the Disputatious Arguments of the Formally Similar Pieces Following on Spenser’s Six Chivalric Legends and Milton’s Twelve Book Epic

James Nohrnberg

2023-09-30 Volume 53 • Issue 2 • 2023 • Not the Faerie Queene

Book Review


Urvashi Chakravarty, Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England

Urvashi Chakravarty, Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England

Kat Addis

2023-09-30 Volume 53 • Issue 2 • 2023 • Not the Faerie Queene

Michael Ullyot, The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England

Michael Ullyot, The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England

Peter Auger

2023-09-30 Volume 53 • Issue 2 • 2023 • Not the Faerie Queene

John Drakakis, Shakespeare’s Resources

John Drakakis, Shakespeare’s Resources

Daniel Blank

2023-09-30 Volume 53 • Issue 2 • 2023 • Not the Faerie Queene

Jane Hwang Degenhardt, Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage

Jane Hwang Degenhardt, Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage

Andrew Duxfield

2023-09-30 Volume 53 • Issue 2 • 2023 • Not the Faerie Queene

Jessica Rosenberg, Botanical Poetics: Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print

Jessica Rosenberg, Botanical Poetics: Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print

Shannon Kelley

2023-09-30 Volume 53 • Issue 2 • 2023 • Not the Faerie Queene

Caroline Bicks, Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare’s World: Rethinking Female Adolescence

Caroline Bicks, Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare’s World: Rethinking Female Adolescence

Bernice Mittertreiner Neal

2023-09-30 Volume 53 • Issue 2 • 2023 • Not the Faerie Queene

Laurie Maguire, The Rhetoric of the Page

Laurie Maguire, The Rhetoric of the Page

Anna Reynolds

2023-09-30 Volume 53 • Issue 2 • 2023 • Not the Faerie Queene

Tessie Prakas, Poetic Priesthood in the Seventeenth Century: Reformed Ministry and Radical Verse

Tessie Prakas, Poetic Priesthood in the Seventeenth Century: Reformed Ministry and Radical Verse

Naya Tsentourou

2023-09-30 Volume 53 • Issue 2 • 2023 • Not the Faerie Queene