In her Afterword to the recent special issue of Spenser Studies on Spenser and Race (co-edited by Dennis Britton and Kimberly Coles), Ayanna Thompson makes several suggestions about how we might read, study and teach Spenser in ways that fully acknowledge the structures of systematic racial oppression that underpin both the poem and our discipline. We need new editions of The Faerie Queene that are both cheap enough to be accessible and that also fully and honestly annotate the poem – glossing ‘Sarazin’ as ‘Muslim’, for instance. ‘Second, we may need to rethink where The Faerie Queene belongs in our curricula,’ she writes. Read more…
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