Spenser’s Pastoral Places

Originally a plenary lecture given at the 2015 Spenser Conference in Dublin on “Spenser’s Places/The Place of Spenser,” this article explores the place of Spenser in the pastoral tradition, encompassing as it does Virgil, the Bible, and also the various other versions of pastoral that had emerged over the course of the Middle Ages. Spenser constantly sets these rich strands of inheritance in dialectical opposition to each other, principally in the Shepheardes Calender but also in the Faerie Queene; and he associates these different traditions with different kinds of places, of landscapes, which set up their own kinds of dialectic.