Edmund Spenser and the Romance of Space

Tamsin Badcoe is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol

'In this fascinating, interdisciplinary study Tamsin Badcoe reads Spenser’s works alongside the practical arts of cosmography and navigation and considers the poet’s green, muddy and coastal settings in relation to the imagined spaces of William Cuningham, John Dee and Sir Walter Ralegh. By bringing together literary, cultural and historical geographers she explores how the imagination contributes to early modern developments in geographical knowledge. [The book] contributes vitally to the knowledge of early modern literatures and environments ... This complex, highly nuanced analysis of literary and geographical works by Spenser and other makers of the spatial imaginary offers new, compelling readings of The Faerie Queene, ‘Colin Clouts Come Home Againe’, A View of the Present State of Ireland, and the ‘Mutabilitie Cantos’.... Badcoe’s brilliant inquiry, which charts the labyrinthine course of literary and geographical terrain and plumbs the depths of the English and Irish seas with literal and figurative navigational tools, is well worth a careful read.'Jennifer C. Vaught, The Spenser Review

• List of illustrationsTextual noteIntroductionPart I: Orientations1 Strange paths and perspective glasses2 Movement and measurement3 Feyned no where acts4 Compassing desire: cosmography and chorographyPart II: Environments5 Seamarks and coastal waters6 Wetlands and Spenser’s ‘personal curvature’7 Spenser’s insular fictionsAfterwordBibliographyIndex