Rereading Chaucer and Spenser is a much-needed volume that brings together established and early career scholars to provide new critical approaches to the relationship between Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser. By reading one of the greatest poets of the Middle Ages alongside one of the greatest poets of the English Renaissance, this collection poses questions about poetic authority, influence, and the nature of intertextual relations in a more wide-ranging manner than ever before. With its dual focus on authors from periods often conceived as radically separate, the collection also responds to current interests in periodisation. This approach will engage academics, researchers and students of Medieval and Early Modern culture.

Reviews

'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

Editors

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