Edmund Spenser, Selected Letters and Other Papers provides the first published text of the diplomatic and personal papers written, copied, and handled by Spenser during his years of secretarial service and colonial planting in Ireland, 1580-1589. These manuscript letters and papers represent a rich resource for the study of Spenser's poetry and prose - particularly his allegorical epic The FaerieQueene (1590, 1596) and his study of Irish culture and government, A view of the present state of Ireland (1596) - giving unparalleled insight into the day-to-day administration of the New English government in Ireland, in both Dublin and Munster, during a time of constant war, diplomacy, social engineering, espionage, and plantation. In a generous introduction, Burlinson and Zurcher situate Spenser's Irish secretarial experience in its political and military contexts, survey the conditions and constraints of early modern secretaryship, and draw out the importance of the letters to the studies of Spenser's verse and prose. The selection (constituting about half of Spenser's known surviving papers) is fully annotated throughout with both textual and interpretative notes, which explain the dense and complex historical reference of the documents, and point readers toward further reading in both manuscript and printed sources. The volume also includes illustrations from several of Spenser's manuscripts, as well as an extensive set of appendices including biographical essays on Spenser's associates, a chronology, maps, and other materials.

An examination of the way in which the material world is depicted in The Faerie Queene. This book provides a radical reassessment of Spenserian allegory, in particular of The Faerie Queene, in the light of contemporary historical and theoretical interests in space and material culture. It explores the ambiguous and fluctuating attention to materiality, objects, and substance in the poetics of The Faerie Queene, and discusses the way that Spenser's creation of allegorical meaning makes use of this materiality, and transforms it.It suggests further that a critical engagement with materiality (which has been so important to the recent study of early modern drama) must come, in the case of allegorical narrative, through a study of narrative and physical space, and in this context it goes on to provide a reading of the spatial dimensions of the poem - quests and battles, forests, castles and hovels - and the spatial characteristics of Spenser's other writings. The book reaffirms theneed to place Spenser in his historical contexts - philosophical and scientific, military and architectural - in early modern England, Ireland and Europe, but also provides a critical reassessment of this literary historicism. Dr CHRISTOPHER BURLINSON is a Research Fellow in English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Ralph Knevet's Supplement of the Faery Queene (1635) is a narrative and allegorical work, which weaves together a complex collection of tales and episodes, featuring knights, ladies, sorcerers, monsters, vertiginous fortresses and deadly battles - a chivalric romp in Spenser's cod medieval style. The poem shadows recent English history, and the major military and political events of the Thirty Years War. But the Supplement is also an ambitiously intertextual poem, weaving together materials from mythic, literary, historical, scientific, theological, and many other kinds of written sources. Its encyclopaedic ambitions combine with Knevet's historical focus to produce an allegorical epic poem of considerable interest and power. This new edition of Knevet's Supplement, the first scholarly text of the poem ever published, situates it in its literary, historical, biographical, and intellectual contexts. An extensive introduction and copious critical commentary, positioned at the back of the book, will enable students and scholars alike to access Knevet's complicated and enigmatic meanings, structures, and allusions. -- .