Publisher's Synopsis
This volume sheds new light on the life of the poet Edmund Spenser, a major canonical author whose entire literary career coincided with his vocation as a prominent Elizabethan planter in Ireland. Despite the number of specialist monographs devoted to him, and the commendable biography undertaken by A. C. Judson for the Variorum edition of his works, a major gap remains in Spenser Studies. This gap arises from the lack of a proper synthesis of the literary and historical lives. What was Spenser doing when he wasn't writing The Faerie Queene ? By bringing together two traditionally distinct strands of scholarship on Spenser, and then splicing the English Renaissance literary biography with the early modern Irish historiography, one can reconstruct a fuller picture of the poet than has hitherto been available. Furthermore, this new portrait of Spenser will appeal across the two disciplines of literature and history. Contents: List of Maps; General Editor's Preface; Introduction; List of Abbreviations; A SPENSER CHRONOLOGY; The Spenser Circle; Select Bibliography; Index.
