Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth-Century Book. By Hazel Wilkinson

Abstract

The full story of spenser’s reception history in the eighteenth century has— aside from the studies by Richard C. Frushell (1999), David Hill Radcliffe (1996), and Earl R. Wasserman (1947)—remained largely untold. Until, that is, Hazel Wilkinson’s Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth-Century Book. Whereas other scholars have focused on imitations of Spenser in the eighteenth century or aspects of Spenserianism that infiltrated eighteenth-century culture, Wilkinson takes us back to the beginning: she focuses on how a bibliographical study of Spenser, which necessarily includes the history of the book trade as well as the history of editing, printing, and publishing The Faerie Queene, opens up new avenues for re-thinking not only how Spenser was read (or not read in its entirety, as Wilkinson persuasively argues), but also how his poetry was appropriated to various political ends. Drawing on the field of library history to illuminate how, as an object, The Faerie Queene became an artefact invested with particular social, cultural, and political significance, Wilkinson traces how eighteenth-century editions of The Faerie Queene as well as poetical miscellanies which included Spenser’s poetry became productive of meaning in ways that the romance epic itself—largely by dint of its sheer length and charge of ‘unreadability’—often could not be.