We are online more than offline in our daily lives, and certainly our scholarship these days. And the spaces of online scholarship – formal and informal, ephemeral but archived, collective but individual – are becoming increasingly material to our cultural thinking and critical practice. Read more…
What would Spenser have chosen as his Twitter handle, and how many accounts might he have run (@EK? @colinclout? @immerito? @belphoebe is taken). The capacity to construct and project a range of voices and identities would have appealed to him, as would the endless capacity of Twitter to grandstand, amplify and nit-pick. There would have been a parody account (@gabrielharvey?) and bids for poetic ownership (curating a @philipsidneyspeaks account, possibly). Read more…
Early in 2021, the officers of the International Spenser Society (ISS) announced the launch of a new initiative called ‘Spenser at Random’. People would be invited to meet over Zoom, at which point a stanza from The Faerie Queene would be chosen using a random number generator, and the gathered company would then be split off into breakout rooms to discuss the stanza in question for a set period of time. The principal stimulus for this initiative was a successful online event that we ran in December 2020 as part of the ISS’s Inclusive Pedagogy Initiative. Read more…
What is today the Sidney-Spenser Discussion List started as a listserv managed by Risa Bear on the darkwing server at the University of Oregon, sometime in the 1990s, back in the days before JStor and spam, when the OED was a book and Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school. A lot has changed since then, but one thing that has altered comparatively little – which is almost a surprise, when you think about it – is email. Read more…
In Book VI, canto x of The Faerie Queene, a group of brigands raid the poem’s pastoral idyll and capture Melibee, Coridon and Pastorella. At the beginning of the next canto, the brigands unsuccessfully attempt to sell their captives into slavery. This essay wonders why Spenser’s Faerie Queene enters into an apparently non-allegorical mode in order to describe a process that itself relies on the operations of allegory. Since the essay originated as a conference paper intending to provoke further thought about the term “slaves” as it appears in Spenser’s poem, it neither exhausts possible avenues of investigation nor concludes those that it opens up, but I hope that it indicates a few productive ways forward. Read more…
Michael Murrin, who wrote about Spenser his whole career, died late this summer. By that time Alzheimer’s had already taken away his erudition, which was formidable by any standard, together with the use of his library, which eventually filled two apartments. For weeks after the end came, I felt hollowed out. Read more…
Bas relief from the exterior of the Scuola San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice. Photo courtesy of Roger Kuin.
- Jane Kingsley-Smith, The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets —
- Thomas Herron, Denna J. Iammarino and Maryclaire Moroney, eds., John Derricke’s The Image of Irelande: with a Discoverie of Woodkarne: Essays on Text and Context —
- Erin A. McCarthy, Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England —
- Andrew Wallace, The Presence of Rome in Medieval and Early Modern Britain: Texts, Artefacts and Beliefs —