Rereading Chaucer and Spenser

Rachel Stenner is Senior Lecturer in English Literature, 1350-1660 at the University of SussexTamsin Badcoe is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of BristolGareth Griffith is a former Senior Lecturer and Director of Part Time Programmes at the University of Bristol

'This very welcome collection offers twelve essays both by young scholars and by senior figures who have shaped the field of Spenser’s medieval roots, specifically here in Chaucer. Studies that interrogate the continuities and transformations (rather than outright rejections) between the English middle ages and early modern period have grown in recent years – pre-eminently in the work of Helen Cooper, one of this volume’s contributors ... What emerges from this collaborative study of Spenser in relation a ‘collaborative’ medieval writer is not a retrograde conservatism on Spenser’s part, but rather a demonstration of the dynamics of Spenserian poetry. As Archer writes in the collection’s final essay, with the ‘seductive binary of the old and the new, Spenser hoodwinks his readers into taking untenable stances on either side… [I]n fact his work breaks down even attempts to reconcile the two’.'The Spenser Review

• Introduction - Rachel Stenner, Tamsin Badcoe, Gareth Griffith 1 Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in Spenser’s Amoretti and The Faerie Queene: reading historically and intertextually - Judith H. Anderson 2 ‘Litle herd gromes piping in the wind’: The Shepheardes Calender, The House of Fame, and ‘La Compleynt’ - Helen Barr 3 Diverse pageants: normative arrays of sexuality - Helen Cooper 4 The source of poetry: Pernaso, Paradise, and Spenser’s Chaucerian craft - Claire Eager 5 Chaucer in Ireland: archaism, etymology, and the idea of development - William Rhodes 6 Wise wights in privy places: rhyme and stanza form in Spenser and Chaucer - Richard Danson Brown 7 Romancing Geoffrey: Chaucer and romance in the manuscript tradition - Gareth Griffith 8 Cultivating Chaucerian antiquity in The Shepheardes Calender - Megan L. Cook 9 Worthy friends: Speght’s Chaucer and Speght’s Spenser - Elisabeth Chaghafi 10 Chaucer’s ‘Beast Group’ and ‘Mother Hubberds Tale’ - Brendan O’Connell 11 Propagating authority: poetic tradition in The Parliament of Fowls and the Mutabilitie Cantos - Craig A. Berry 12 ‘New matter framed upon the old’: Chaucer, Spenser, and Luke Shepherd’s ‘New Poet’ - Harriet Archer Bibliography of books and essays on Chaucer and Spenser Index