Spenser Edition

FAIN: FA-52531-06

David Lee Miller
University of South Carolina (Columbia, SC 29208-0001)

Edmund Spenser is a central figure in the literary culture of the Renaissance, but textual scholarship on his writings is out of date. An international group of scholars has begun a collaborative effort to re-edit Spenser’s complete works. I am one of four general editors managing this project. We have a contract with Oxford University Press to prepare a three-volume edition for their English Text Series. We are building an electronic archive, and will eventually make our work the basis of classroom editions. In this application I seek support specifically for my contributions to volume one of the Oxford edition. My principal task is to edit the text of the 1590 FAERIE QUEENE. I will also provide textual and editorial commentary.

Associated Products

The Chastity of Allegory (Article)
Title: The Chastity of Allegory
Author: David Lee Miller
Abstract: Building on Quilligan’s discussion of the female perspective in Book III of The Faerie Queene, Berger’s emphasis on “conspicuous allusion,” and De Laurretis’s notion of “technologies of gender,” this talk focuses on “technologies of desire” in Spenser’s Legend of Chastity. These include discourses but also other media—representational apparatuses of all sorts that evoke erotic feeling and shape it as experience and as expression. Spenser’s concern with such technologies surfaces immediately in the proem, as it mirrors (and foreshadows) the Busyrane episode, and later in an allegory that seeks to represent representation along with the damage it can do, as images, objects, creatures, and characters disappear from the narrated action, quite literally absorbed into discourse. Against the pervasive harm of unchaste discourse, Spenser poses on the one hand a utopian fantasy of untrammeled freedom in erotic address, and on the other a visionary quest for the ungesehenmachen (“making-unhappened”) of the amorous discourses dominant in Elizabethan literature, staged as a re-virgination of the culture’s erotic imagination. These concerns re-emerge in Amoretti and Epithalamion and carry over into the 1596 installment of The Faerie Queene, where Scudamore appears as a failed counterpart to the poet-speaker of Spenser’s sonnet sequence and marriage poem. The Dance of the Graces in canto x of Book VI offers a culminating version of the utopian fantasy of unconstrained erotic celebration, located now in the intimacy of the nuptial relation.
Year: 2014
Primary URL: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/spenserstudies/abstracts/
Primary URL Description: Web site for Spenser Studies. Abstract only available.
Access Model: online access is subscription only
Format: Other
Periodical Title: Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual
Publisher: AMS Press

“A Neglected Source for the Mortdant and Amavia Episode in The Faerie Queene” (Article)
Title: “A Neglected Source for the Mortdant and Amavia Episode in The Faerie Queene”
Author: David Lee Miller
Abstract: This scholarly note presents evidence suggesting that the allegory of a famously problematic episode in Book II of The Faerie Queene can be clarified by recognizing its source in the marginal glosses to key passages in the Geneva translation of the Epistle to Romans.
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/content/61/2/229.short?rss=1
Primary URL Description: Link to first page.
Access Model: restricted access, subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Notes and Queries, New Series
Publisher: Oxford University Press

“Building a Spenser Archive—One Scan at a Time” (Blog Post)
Title: “Building a Spenser Archive—One Scan at a Time”
Author: David Lee Miller
Abstract: This blog post, originally a magazine article, describes the digital archive that the editors of the Oxford Spenser are creating in conjunction with their edition.
Date: 07/01/2006
Primary URL: https://blogs.library.duke.edu/magazine/2007/04/25/building-a-spenser-archive/
Primary URL Description: full text available
Blog Title: “Building a Spenser Archive—One Scan at a Time”
Website: Duke University Libraries Magazine

"Laughing at Spenser's Daphnaida" (Article)
Title: "Laughing at Spenser's Daphnaida"
Author: David Lee Miller
Abstract: How could Spenser have written a poem as inexplicably bad as Daphnaida, and why did he publish it? Having done so once, in 1591, why did he then republish the poem, unrevised, in 1596? And having published it the first time solus, why in 1596 did he republish it as a companion piece to the highly accomplished Fowre Hymnes? This essay proposes speculative answers to all three questions. Daphnaida is deliberately bad and indeed advertises itself as such, explicitly banishing the Horatian pair utile et dulce in its opening stanzas. This may be the form Spenser's resistance took if he was prevailed upon by Sir Walter Ralegh to write an elegy proclaiming Arthur Gorges's inconsolable grief for his young wife as part of a campaign to gain control over her estate. This explanation holds for the republication in 1596, when Ralegh had been rehabilitated at court and Gorges was pursuing the wardship of his daughter Ambrosia, but it fails to explain the pairing of Daphnaidai with Fowre Hymnes. That is explained by reading Fowre Hymnes as a revisionary take on Petrarch's Trionfi: a generalized work of mourning for all created things, but one from which the motivating event of Laura's death has been elided. Daphnaida, written in the same stanza as the Hymnes, offers their precise reverse: a death so particularized and definitive that all mourning for it is summarily refused. Together the poems complicate and resituate each other as radically alternative versions of the same underlying recognition, namely that hatred for the world is ultimately a false posture. Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, Volume XXVI, pp 241–250 Copyright 2011 AMS Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
Year: 2010
Primary URL: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/spenserstudies/abstracts/
Access Model: full text by subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual
Publisher: AMS Press

The Spenser Archive: Prototype (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: The Spenser Archive: Prototype
Author: Joseph Loewenstein
Author: David Lee Miller
Author: Patrick Cheney
Author: Stephen Pentecost
Author: Douglas Knox
Abstract: The Spenser Project Digital Archive is the online companion to the Collected Works of Edmund Spenser, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. At present, readers have access here to full-text versions of the books in which Spenser’s work appeared between 1569 and 1590: A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings, The Shepheardes Calender, the Spenser-Harvey Letters, and The First Part of The Faerie Queene (books I-III), as well as facsimiles of those books. We also provide scans of all pages containing variant states, an analysis of various forme-states within editions of these texts, and, in the case of The Shepheardes Calender, a grid of variants across the early editions through 1611. Behind the scenes, we are constructing an even richer archive, which will supplement the forthcoming Oxford Edition of the Collected Works of Edmund Spenser—and so increase the usefulness of that edition. Transcriptions of all of Spenser’s works will soon be made publicly available, and edited versions of those texts will follow shortly. Glossaries, commentary, textual and critical introductions, will be available here as soon as they are completed and approved for public release by OUP.
Year: 2008
Primary URL: http://talus.artsci.wustl.edu/spenserArchivePrototype/
Primary URL Description: Full digital archive password-protected, under time-limited contractual obligation to Oxford University Press.
Access Model: Limited access, full access pending

"Comedy as Discourse in The Faerie Queene" (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: "Comedy as Discourse in The Faerie Queene"
Abstract: The comic strain in Spenser is pervasive but hard to isolate. Spenser mingles comedy with pathos and mock-seriousness, often playing them against one another in the same passage or episode. The resulting complexity of tone makes a critical focus on comic elements tricky to sustain: the comic is always poised against, and qualifying, the monstrous, the lamentable, the pathetic, or the fearful. This paper considers examples from the second half of the Legend of Chastity, where Spenser uses comedy first as a technique for modulating the tone and affect of his narrative as it moves from one episode to another (Florimell in the witch’s cottage) and then as a strategy for doubling the narrative back upon itself, in a meta-discursive allegory that extends from Satyrane’s combat with the Hyena-like creature through the Squire of Dames’ rendition of the Inkeeper’s tale from Ariosto to the adventures of Malbecco. This persistent feature of Book III and especially its final cantos reflects the legend’s central concern with the ethics of masculine address to women, whether as readers or as prospective lovers.
Author: David Lee Miller
Date: 08/24/2013
Location: New Orleans
Primary URL: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/review/volume-43/433/abstracts/sixteenth-century-society-conference/
Primary URL Description: Conference abstracts published in online journal.

“Building the Spenser Archive,” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “Building the Spenser Archive,”
Author: David Lee Miller
Abstract: Presentation on digital archive under construction to accompany the Oxford Spenser.
Date: 02/03/2007
Primary URL: http://textualstudies.blogspot.com/2006/12/producing-renaissance-text-current.html
Primary URL Description: Conference CFP
Secondary URL: https://sc.edu/about/centers/digital_humanities/projects/spenser.php
Conference Name: Producing the Renaissance Text: Current Technologies of Editing—in Theory and Practice

"The Chastity of Allegory" (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: "The Chastity of Allegory"
Author: David Lee Miller
Abstract: Building on Quilligan’s discussion of the female perspective in Book III of The Faerie Queene, Berger’s emphasis on “conspicuous allusion,” and De Laurretis’s notion of “technologies of gender,” this talk focuses on “technologies of desire” in Spenser’s Legend of Chastity. These include discourses but also other media—representational apparatuses of all sorts that evoke erotic feeling and shape it as experience and as expression. Spenser’s concern with such technologies surfaces immediately in the proem, as it mirrors (and foreshadows) the Busyrane episode, and later in an allegory that seeks to represent representation along with the damage it can do, as images, objects, creatures, and characters disappear from the narrated action, quite literally absorbed into discourse. Against the pervasive harm of unchaste discourse, Spenser poses on the one hand a utopian fantasy of untrammeled freedom in erotic address, and on the other a visionary quest for the ungesehenmachen (“making-unhappened”) of the amorous discourses dominant in Elizabethan literature, staged as a re-virgination of the culture’s erotic imagination. These concerns re-emerge in Amoretti and Epithalamion and carry over into the 1596 installment of The Faerie Queene, where Scudamore appears as a failed counterpart to the poet-speaker of Spenser’s sonnet sequence and marriage poem. The Dance of the Graces in canto x of Book VI offers a culminating version of the utopian fantasy of unconstrained erotic celebration, located now in the intimacy of the nuptial relation.
Date: 05/15/2014

1. “Temperance, Interpretation, and ‘the bodie of this death’: Pauline Allegory in The Faerie Queen, Book II,” (Article)
Title: 1. “Temperance, Interpretation, and ‘the bodie of this death’: Pauline Allegory in The Faerie Queen, Book II,”
Author: David Lee Miller
Abstract: This essay reinterprets the "dark conceit" of Mortdant, Amavia, and Ruddymane near the beginning of Spenser's Legend of Temperance. The argument examines the counterpoint between Paul's lament for "the body of this death" in Romans and the death scene of Dido in the Aeneid. The essay reads key episodes of Book II as a sustained allegory of misrecognition, according to which Guyon persists in trying to do combat with forces in his own flesh as if they were opponents to be confronted by force of arms. The recognition implicitly demanded by this allegory of misrecognition is shadowed in Arthur's interpretation of Maleger as an Antaeus-figure, and then triumphantly repudiated in Guyon's violent destruction of the Bower.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6757.12075
Primary URL Description: Scholar Commons Gallery maintained by Thomas Cooper Library at University of South Carolina
Secondary URL: https://www-journals-uchicago-edu.pallas2.tcl.sc.edu/doi/10.1111/1475-6757.12075
Secondary URL Description: archive for journal maintained by publisher University of Chicago Press
Access Model: Subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: English Literary Renaissance
Publisher: University of Chicago Press

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