This inaugural issue of The Spenser Review in its new format is dedicated to the memory of our colleague Marshall Grossman, a distinguished scholar and critic who taught at the University of Maryland.

Although deeply saddened by the loss of this beloved colleague, we are grateful for the body of work he left behind. Friends and colleagues have been editing for publication work that he left unfinished at his death. A conference paper entitled “Inserting Me: Some Instances of Predication and the Privation of the Private Self in Shakespeare and Donne” appears with a response from David Miller in the volume Shakespeare and Donne: Generic Hybrids and the Cultural Imaginary, edited by Judith H. Anderson and Jennifer C. Vaught and dedicated to Marshall Grossman, forthcoming from Fordham University Press. An essay on Milton entitled “Poetry and Belief in Paradise Regained, to which is added, Samson Agonistes,” edited for publication by Gerard Passannante and Reid Barbour, will appear in Studies in Philology 110.2 (Spring 2013). (The University of Maryland English department’s web page commemorating Marshall may be viewed at http://www.english.umd.edu/news/2651.)

In this issue of The Spenser Review we offer three pieces, opening with a retrospective by Graham Hammill on Marshall’s sustained engagement with The Faerie Queene: “Spenser in Conversation: Marshall Grossman on The Faerie Queene.” Hammill’s thoughtful attention to Marshall’s concern with the shaping force of “the literary” provides a context for reading two conference papers that would have been developed into scholarly articles: “Mimetic Verisimilitude and Poetic Truth in Book II of The Faerie Queene,” and “Spenser’s Middle Voice: The Grammar of Jouissance in Book III of The Faerie Queene.”