Hazel Wilkinson - Böcker

Liber amicorum H. R. Woudhuysen: a Bibliographical Tribute is a Festschrift for Henry Woudhuysen, one of the most senior and influential early modernists, book historians, and scholarly editors of his day, who retires as Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, in 2024. It brings together essays by friends and colleagues spanning some 500 years of literary history, with a strong focus on texts and the people who produce them.

Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590-6) occupied an important place in eighteenth-century culture. Spenser influenced almost every major writer of the century, from Alexander Pope to William Wordsworth. What was it like to read Spenser in the eighteenth century? Who made Spenserian books, and how did their owners use and interpret them? The first comprehensive study of all of the eighteenth-century editions of Edmund Spenser addresses these questions through bibliographical analysis, and through examination of the history of the book and of eighteenth-century literature and culture. Within these contexts, Hazel Wilkinson provides new information about the production, contents, texts, and reception of the eighteenth-century editions of Spenser, to illuminate how his cultural presence became so far-reaching. With each chapter structured around a major edition of Spenser's work, this volume provides a timely addition to arguments about the nature of literary history and the growing cult of great writers of the past.