Salvaging Spenser is a major new work of literary revision which places Edmund Spenser's corpus, from The Shepheardes Calender to A View of the Present State of Ireland, within an elaborate cultural and political context. The author refuses to engage in the sterile opposition between apology and attack that has marred studies of Spenser and Ireland, seeking neither to savage nor to save, but rather, in a project of critical recovery, to salvage Spenser from the wreckage of Irish history.

A Spenser Chronology is the first serious attempt to map out in concrete detail all of the known facts concerning the poet Edmund Spenser, a major canonical author whose entire literary career was spent in Ireland. This book charts Spenser's parallel vocations of Elizabethan planter and Renaissance writer, outlining the activities, appointments and whereabouts of a prominent Irish colonist, and shedding new light on the life of one of the most important figures in English literary history.