The Spenser encyclopedia / A.C. Hamilton [and four others], editor.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Comprehensive in scope and international in outlook, the encyclopedia contains some 700 entries by 422 contributors in 20 countries.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Written for the "intelligent senior undergraduate" (p. xi), this encyclopedia aspires to relate "the best that is known" about Spenser's life and works as well as about a broad range of topics related to Spenser. The approximately 700 topical entries (listed in a useful classified prefatory table) represent the dramatic, musical, and visual arts; biography; literary characters; chivalric and courtly matters; Spenser's historical and literary contemporaries; genres and forms; history; imitations and adaptations of Spenser's works; Spenser's influence and reputation; language and language arts; myth, mythography, and legend; places in The Fairie Queene; poetry and poetics; religion; Spenser scholarship and reference materials; science; sources and literary antecedents; themes and topoi; virtues and vices; and women, marriage, and sexuality; as well as Spenser's individual works. Despite the expansiveness of this coverage and its decade-plus in the making by more than 400 scholars from some 20 countries (accounting for some unevenness), the encyclopedia hits its mark. The vast majority of the entries succeed in maintaining a focus on Spenser that is at once sufficiently detailed and informative and also critically stimulating and persuasive--the sort of approach that should spur further undergraduate (and graduate) research. Entries at the heart of the encyclopedia--those for the books and episodes in The Faerie Queene and for Spenser's other works--recount in detail and critically interpret plots, structures, themes, images, and characterizations. This is not the place to obtain brief synopses. Perhaps more useful are entries for topics, such as "apples," "birds," "critical bibliography," "hair," "rhetoric in Spenser's poetry," and "ship imagery." The best of these, like the one on "falconry," clearly support broad theses with selections of the best examples from Spenser's texts. Not all such critical theses, however, are quite so fully supported. Although nearly three full pages of examples in the entry for "sex" indicate the pervasiveness of sexual imagery in The Fairie Queene, to say that the poem "is the most extended and extensive meditation on sex in the history of European poetry" (p. 638) perhaps overstates what the illustrations actually show. Biographical entries are generally informative. Those about Spenser's indebtedness to the likes of Virgil, Boethius, and Dante and about his influence on Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, are detailed, lucid, and pointed. Bibliographies accompany the entries, giving full information for works cited only once and cross-referencing an appended general bibliography of frequently cited works. Also appended are black-and-white illustrations of Elizabeth I and Spenser's contemporaries and facsimiles of title pages, emblems, and Spenser's handwriting. An adequate subject index lists topics in the encyclopedia and the entries in which those topics are treated. It is accurate to say that this encyclopedia generally represents the state-of-the-art scholarship on Spenser. For libraries supporting undergraduate and graduate courses and research that focus substantially on Spenser. -J. K. Bracken, Ohio State University