Glossing Spenser’s Griesly

Abstract

Scholars often gloss Spenser’s adjective griesly with conventional synonyms: frightful, horrible, ghastly. While Spenser’s griesly is no doubt semantically linked with these words, it does more than merely denote the frightening and bizarre. This gleaning suggests that glossing Spenser’s griesly in these terms precludes a reading of its connotative range. When read across and through Spenser’s corpus, griesly conveys three linked thematic associations: the passage of time, liminality, and senescence/mutability.