204 Reviews a medieval Asiatic town) and somanifesting 'her own complicity with a system of power relations based on linguistic difference' (p. 47); the contrast of the unmarked English vernacular with the stronglymarked Latin of theTale goes unmentioned. And the Prioress herself,Williams coyly implies, is having a lesbian affairwith her chapeleyn. She finds fuel forher thesis in all such arguments, but the resulting smoke obscures thebook's real potential for illumination. MAGDALENE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE HELEN COOPER Spenser Studies, vol. xix. Ed. by WILLIAM A. ORAM, ANNE LAKE PRESCOTT, and THOMAS P. ROCHE, Jr.New York: AMS. 2004. vi+ 257 PP. $79.50. ISBN 978 0-404-19217-4. It has been gratifying towitness the revival of Spenser Studies over recent years. Ten years ago the annual series experienced some serious setbacks, suffering from multiple years of lapsed issues,with the attendant decline of itsutility as a forum for current Spenserian scholarship. Indeed, these years saw the growing prominence of individual book collections of essays as competitive vehicles fornew work on Spenser. Now, with those lapsed issues having been seen through production, along with the steady release of current volumes, Spenser Studies ison as firma footing as ithas ever been. While this new volume ismore evolutionary than revolutionary, itprovides a number of freshviews on Spenser, mostly on themiddle books of The Faerie Queene. In a lively, relaxed transcription of her 2002 Kathleen Williams Lecture, Lauren Silberman addresses the current state of political approaches to The Faerie Queene, and how the textmay be read to deepen and nuance-without apologizing for Spenser's own political biases. Jeff Dolven and Kenneth Gross each offeran indivi dual analysis of a single Spenserian stanza as an entryway into talking about thework of the stanza throughout thepoem. Itwas a delight to observe these two critics take on a classic student exercise in stanzaic explication, and Iwould wish for the editors to invite furtherofferingsof this format. Several essays attempt to read Spenser's epic through non-literary discourses. Todd Butler's original and interesting take on 'Saluage' multitudes examines how The Faerie Queene interprets 'the struggle to reinvigorate theChurch ofEngland after the Marian persecution' (p. 93). Butler profitably reads theEgalitarian Giant's rabble against theological rather than theusual economic contexts, scoring huge points with this reviewer for avoiding the near ubiquity of colonial Ireland as the only context with which to examine thismost historically situated of the poem's books. Andrew Wallace's look at georgic discourse offers amore complex, nuanced understanding of such undercurrents inThe Faerie Queene bymoving beyond the strictVirgilian defi nitions of the genre. Despite some fine local readings of the educations ofRedcrosse and Satyrane,Wallace is less specific on the ideological motives behind such episodes, or on Spenser's erasure of the georgic imperatives in the I596 edition. In giving us everything we wanted to know about Aristotelian-Galenic psycho-physiology but were afraid to ask, James Broaddus provides perfectly sensible explanations for the Guyon's 'faint' at the end of theMammon episode, and forhow Maleger's troops represent the external forces of decay rather than internalized 'passions'. Paul Suttie briefly sketches out Guyon's problematic alternatives between self restraint versus chivalric violence as contradictory definitions of temperance, while Raphael Lyne intriguinglyexplores thepositive representations of theGrille figure in Plutarch, Erasmus, andMontaigne. In 'Providential Love and Suffering inThe Faerie Queene, Book III', JasonGleckman usefully connects the anguish of feminine charac ters likeAmoret and Britomart to codes of Protestant providentialism that attempt MLR, 102. I, 2007 205 to resolve sexual desire, lovemelancholy, and thecompanionate marriage. Even more interesting,however, is the argument's attempt to apply Teresa Krier's work on the Spenserian gaze todislodge theviews ofSusan Frye,David Lee Miller, and Sheila Ca vanaugh, which equate Busirane's violence with the text'spatriarchal ideology. Sadly, however, this work remains only loosely sketched out, often in the footnotes,hardly the rightplace for this important debate. Although these essays as a group can frequently be faulted forhedging theirmost provocative arguments, they form a profitable col lection of new Spenserian work in an increasingly steady and interesting forum. XAVIER UNIVERSITY OF LOUISIANA BRUCE DANNER Spenser and Ovid. By SYRITHE PUGH. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2005. vii+302 pp...