ENG 342: Renaissance English Literature

In this study, Kathryn Walls challenges the standard identification of Una with the post-Reformation English Church, arguing that she is, rather, Augustine's City of God - the invisible Church, whose membership is known only to God.

In his vibrant and vivid book, the first biography of the poet for 60 years, Andrew Hadfield finds a more complex and subtle Spenser. How did a man who seemed destined to become a priest or a don become embroiled in politics? If he was intent on social climbing, why was he so astonishingly rude to the good and the great Lord Burghley, the earl of Leicester, Sir Walter Ralegh, Elizabeth I and James VI?

Introduces a Renaissance masterpiece to a modern audience.This Guide will help new readers to understand and enjoy The Faerie Queene, drawing attention to its various ironies, its self-reflexive construction, its visual emphasis and the timeless ethical, political, and literary questions thatit asks of all of us.

The question of selfhood in Renaissance texts constitutes a scholarly and critical debate of almost unmanageable proportions. The author of this work begins by questioning the strategies with which male writers depict powerful women.

Carol V. Kaske examines how the form, no less than the theology, of Spenser's writings reveals the influence of the Bible and medieval and Renaissance Biblical hermeneutics. Her approach partakes of both the old historicism and the new.

Dr Hume seeks to illuminate Spenser's major poems, The Shepheardes Calender and The Faerie Queene, by placing them in a relevant context of Elizabethan Protestant thought and writings. Her detailed analysis shows how words, images and episodes in both poems come into focus when the reader takes account of sermons, biblical commentaries, devotional treatises and controversial works of the Elizabethan decades.