With this issue, editorship of The Spenser Review passes into the hands of a new triumvirate, Jeff Dolven, Kasey Evans, and Claire Falck. Together, we look forward to continuing The Spenser Review’s long tradition of creating a community where Spenserians can come together in the spirit of supportive, lively, and engaged scholarly exchange and accomplishment. Fittingly, it is our book review editors, Tamsin Badcoe, Joshua Reid, and Abigail Shinn, who carry us across. The eleven reviews here continue the tradition of full and thoughtful assessments of books from across the field of early modern studies for which the Review has long been known.

That tradition will continue, under Joshua and Abigail’s watchful eyes (as we bid a grateful farewell to Tamsin)—and so will the Review’s newer tradition of presenting a selection of shorter essays written for and around a common issue theme, which has long given Spenser scholars, from the greenest graduate students to the most seasoned emeriti, an opportunity to explore together some shared corners of our poet’s wide ambit. The spirit we hope to cultivate is something like the feeling you get in The Shepheardes Calender, when a few shepherds encounter one another at a moment of thoughtful leisure, and decide to sing together on a common topic. The shepherds find in those occasions the virtues both of improvisation and of shared long experience with the forms of song. For us scholars, that means essays that are ad hoc, but strike deep; that allow our community a more intimate, responsive (and faster!) form of public conversation than the usual full-dress article. We hope that, during our editorship, The Spenser Review can continue to provide a space for the kind of imaginative and experimental play so characteristic of both Spenser, and twenty-first century Spenserian scholarship.

Not that such play need be trivial. The call has just gone out for the next 2025 issue, which will showcase essays on “Spenser and Free Speech.” After that we look forward to our third 2025 issue, “Cinematic Spenser.” And then? We already have plans for an early 2026 issue on Spenserian weather, climate, and atmospherics. The three of us are joined in that work by three new managing editors, Mary Kate Guma, Firdevs Idil Kurtulan, and Josephine Wang, all graduate students at Princeton University. Their cheerful labor on the back end of the Review, and their advice on all aspects of its face to the world, are already indispensable.

And so we hope that Spenserians everywhere, card-carrying and novice alike, will consider contributing. As we write, the study of the humanities is facing unprecedented challenges, political and technological, to the work that we do. To meet those challenges we will have to do that work well, and do it together—in whatever direct action will be asked of us, but also in caring for the objects of our love and study and for the intellectual friendship they have brought us. Spenser is a great convener, and in taking the reins we renew the Review’s call to gather in his name, to read and write and think.