The Manchester Spenser- Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calender (1579) An Analyzed Facsimile Edition

Recontextualizing Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender in relation to book history, this study analyses the first edition of 1579 as a material text, and provides the first clearly detailed facsimile available as a book. By illuminating the 1579 Calender’s development, this volume much advances understanding of Spenser and Elizabethan culture.

As first published in 1579, Spenser’s verbal-visual Shepheardes Calender is a most extraordinary early modern book and its particular characteristics have major interpretive importance. This present volume freshly reassesses that first edition as a material text in relation to previous book history and provides the first clearly detailed facsimile reproduction of it available as a book. Almost all previous surrogates for the 1579 Calender, whether disseminated as printed books, in microfilm, or online, as well as the reproductions of its twelve woodcuts typically included in modern editions, lack sufficient clarity to represent the original book reliably. This problem has especially impaired understanding of the Calender’s pictures, each of which was designed to complement one of Spenser’s twelve eclogues. In this way and others, such as the inclusion of a full commentary on the poetry, the 1579 Calender’s total design as a book radically rethought the bibliographical possibilities for presenting imaginative fiction and new poetry. This volume illuminates its antecedents, development and production, the profound interconnections of its illustrations and poetry, its redefinition of pastoral, its bold redefinition of the proper role of poets and insistence on the national significance of poetic achievement, its daring political satire and its creative singularity. For many years to come, An analysed facsimile will be essential for study of Spenser’s Calender, this poet and his importance for English literary history.

Spenser’s extraordinary Shepheardes Calender as first printed in 1579 is arguably the seminal book of the Elizabethan literary renaissance. This volume reassesses it as a material text in relation to book history, and provides the first clearly detailed facsimile of the 1579 Calender available as a book. The editor reconsiders the original book’s development, production, design, and particular characteristics, and demonstrates both its correlations with diverse precursors in print and its significant departures. Numerous illustrations of archival sources facilitate comparison. By reinvestigating the 1579 Calender’s twelve pictures, he shows that Spenser himself probably designed them, that they involve complex symbolism, and that this book’s meaning is thus profoundly verbal-visual. An analyzed facsimile is an essential new resource for study of Spenser’s Calender, Spenser, Elizabethan print and poetics, and early modern English literary history.