As Rachel Eisendrath, one of this issue’s contributors suggests, ‘Reading is committed, like a subjectivity, to not being a unified, singular, finished thing but to being that which can continue to unfold in time’. The winter has been long (and this issue delayed), but the current issue offers an array of reading to help unfold through it.

Alongside two substantial book reviews, our features include a commissioned reflection by Eisendrath on the writing of her innovative new book of criticism and life-writing, Gallery of Clouds (2021); and we also mark the loss of yet another stalwart of early modern studies, Arthur F. Kinney. A further seven reviews await in the Book Reviews section, among them two reviews of important collections of essays: Chris Barrett’s introduction of an exciting collection of essays from The Polyolbion Project and a collection of ‘immense interdisciplinary ambition’ edited by Syrithe Pugh, which offers a new approach to ‘classical reception’, as reviewed by Tomos Evans. No less ambitious is Neil Rhodes’s new literary history of the early modern period, Common, reviewed by Beth Quitslund. Our reviewers also consider major studies of the nature and effects of Shakespeare’s errors (by Alice Leonard), the significance of inheritance (material and spiritual) in literary texts from Chaucer to Shakespeare (by Alex Davis), pan-Protestant European heroism (by Kevin Chovanec) and the philosophical questions of immateriality haunting early modern texts (by James A. Knapp).

David Baker reflects on where and how we stand in relation to A View of the Present State of Ireland, with the help of a new special issue of Explorations in Renaissance Culture, guest-edited by Thomas Herron. Ted Tregear considers the exciting possibility of a significant reorientation of our understanding of the values of authorship and literary production in the period in his review of two new books on anthologies, Michelle O’Callaghan’s Crafting Poetry Anthologies in Renaissance England ((2020) and Megan Heffernan’s Making the Miscellany (2021). Finally, Rachel Eisendrath puzzles through the process of writing her work of creative (and critical) non-fiction and its engagement with literary experience early modern and modern.

We also want to pay tribute to two Spenserian stalwarts who have recently stepped down from The Spenser Review team. Craig Berry has been Digital Reviews Editor for a long time now, and shepherded a range of thoughtful analyses of new digital projects and resources on the early modern world. Beth Quitslund has given sterling service in the role of US Book Reviews Editor over the last few years; a sample of her work can be seen in the rich crop of reviews published in the present issue. We wish both of them well and thank them for all their work.

Jane Grogan and Andrew Hadfield

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