Rereading Chaucer and Spenser: The Manchester Spenser

Rereading Chaucer and Spenser: Dan Geffrey with the New Poete is a much-needed volume that brings together established and early career scholars to provide new critical approaches to the relationship between Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser. By reading one of the greatest poets of the Middle Ages alongside one of the greatest poets of the English Renaissance, this collection addresses questions of poetic authority, influence, and the nature of intertextual relations in a more wide-ranging manner than ever before.
The chapters respond to the concern that we have not fully understood what Chaucer meant to Spenser. The contributors analyse the values that Chaucer represented for Spenser and, more literally, the meanings that were made available to Spenser by Chaucer's works via the forms in which Spenser encountered them. By addressing the ways in which previous critics have read the relationship between these writers, this book offers rereadings and new insights that are in dialogue with current and emerging preoccupations in contemporary scholarship: renewed interests in literary form, book history, garden history, and animal studies. With its dual focus on authors from periods often conceived as radically separate, the collection also intervenes in current debates about periodisation. This approach will engage researchers, academics, and students of Medieval and Early Modern culture.