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44.3 (Winter 2015)

Editor's Choice Leah Whittington

The “Editor’s Choice” for this issue is a response to Heather James’s “Flower Power” from the Fall, 2014 Spenser Review.

If you’d like to know more about “rigorous wallowing” as a way of reading Spenser, here’s Leah Whittington on

“Wallowing and Getting Lost: Reading Spenser with Heather James.” Read more …

How Does Matter Feel? David Landreth

We insist on integrating our feelings into our environment—not only in seeking sympathy, affirmation, or reassurance from the fellow feelers who make up our social world, but in locating feeling in the extra-human conditions of our material world. An “atmosphere” may denote the vast envelope of gases surrounding a planet, or, just as readily, a local environment suffused with feeling. Read more…

How to Read The Faerie Queene: A Forum Edited by Ayesha Ramachandran and Sarah Van der Laan

A pair of roundtables at the 2014 Sixteenth Century Society Conference gathered Spenserians to reflect on the challenges of reading Spenser ourselves and helping our students through their first readings of The Faerie Queene. In the lively discussions that followed, it became clear that the question of “How to Read The Faerie Queene” continues to raise theoretical, methodological and pedagogical quandaries. Read more …

Women Reading and Writing the Bible Hannibal Hamlin

Both Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England (Kate Narveson) and Women & the Bible in Early Modern England (Femke Molekamp) argue that there was a good deal of reading, and a surprising amount of writing, going on outside the classroom, practiced by those without access to schooling, including especially women. Read more …

Forum: Our Readers Respond

Readers are invited to register and comment on this issue.

David Lee Miller: Welcome to the SpR Forum! Respond to reviews, offer suggestions for the web site, post CFPs, announce forthcoming publications … we’d love to hear from you.

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