Edmund Spenser's vast epic poem The Faerie Queene is the most challenging masterpiece in early modern literature and is praised as the work most representative of the Elizabethan age. In it he fused traditions of medieval romance and classical epic, his religious and political allegory creating a Protestant alternative to the Catholic romances rejected by humanists and Puritans. The poem was later made over as children's literature, retold in lavish volumes and schoolbooks and appreciated in pedagogical studies and literary histories. Distinguished writers for children simplified the stories and noted artists illustrated them. Children were less encouraged to consider the allegory than to be inspired to the moral virtues. This book studies The Faerie Queene's many adaptations for a young audience in order to provide a richer understanding of both the original and adapted texts.

Edmund Spenser's vast epic poem The Faerie Queene is the most challenging masterpiece in early modern literature and is praised as the work most representative of the Elizabethan age. In it he fused traditions of medieval romance and classical epic, his religious and political allegory creating a Protestant alternative to the Catholic romances rejected by humanists and Puritans. The poem was later made over as children's literature, retold in lavish volumes and schoolbooks and appreciated in pedagogical studies and literary histories. Distinguished writers for children simplified the stories and noted artists illustrated them. Children were less encouraged to consider the allegory than to be inspired to the moral virtues. This book studies The Faerie Queene's many adaptations for a young audience in order to provide a richer understanding of both the original and adapted texts.

The Faerie Queene is a scholarly masterpiece that has influenced, inspired, and challenged generations of writers, readers and scholars since its completion in 1596. Hamilton's edition is itself, a masterpiece of scholarship and close reading. It is now the standard edition for all readers of Spenser. The entire work is revised, and the text of The Faerie Queene itself has been freshly edited, the first such edition since the 1930s. This volume also contains additional original material, including a letter to Raleigh, commendatory verses and dedicatory sonnets, chronology of Spenser's life and works and provides a compilation of list of characters and their appearances in The Faerie Queene.

The four-hundred-year story of readers' struggles with a famously unreadable poem—and what they reveal about the history of reading and the future of literary studies "I am now in the country, and reading in Spencer's fairy-queen. Pray what is the matter with me?" The plaint of an anonymous reader in 1712 sounds with endearing frankness a note of consternation that resonates throughout The Faerie Queene's reception history, from its first known reader, Spenser's friend Gabriel Harvey, who urged him to write anything else instead, to Virginia Woolf, who insisted that if one wants to like the poem, "the first essential is, of course, not to read" it. For more than four centuries critics have sought to counter this strain of readerly resistance, but rather than trying to remedy the frustrations and failures of Spenser's readers, Catherine Nicholson cherishes them as a sensitive barometer of shifts in the culture of reading itself. Indeed, tracking the poem's mixed fortunes in the hands of its bored, baffled, outraged, intoxicated, obsessive, and exhausted readers turns out to be an excellent way of rethinking the past and future prospects of literary study. By examining the responses of readers from Queen Elizabeth and the keepers of Renaissance commonplace books to nineteenth-century undergraduates, Victorian children, and modern scholars, this book offers a compelling new interpretation of the poem and an important new perspective on what it means to read, or not to read, a work of literature.

Edmund Spenser's tomb at Westminster Abbey has the inscription, the Prince of Poets. If you've read Books I and II of his unfinished English epic, The Faerie Queene, you know why by now. Book III is one of the most unique books, written from the perspective of the heroic Britomart, a warrior princess in search of her true love. Along the way she encounters wizards, monsters, braggarts, sea gods, cheats, and at the end, a deathly palace.

Despite all of his acknowledged greatness, almost no one reads Edmund Spenser (1552-99) anymore. Roy Maynard takes the first book of the 'Faerie Queene, ' exploring the concept of Holiness with the character of the Redcross Knight, and makes Spenser accessible again. He does this not by dumbing it down, but by deftly modernizing the spelling, explaining the obscurities in clever asides, and cuing the reader towards the right response. In today's cultural, aesthetic, and educational wars, Spenser is a mighty ally for twenty-first century Christians. Maynard proves himself a worthy mediator between Spenser's time and ours. (Gene Edward Veith)