Welcome About the Archive About the Edition Contributors Finding Aid Contacts
THE SPENSER ARCHIVE

Contributors

General Editors

Patrick Cheney is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. He has written and edited several books on Renaissance English literature, including Shakespeare's Literary Authorship: Books, Poetry, and Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Spenser’s Famous Flight (University of Toronto Press, 1993). In addition, he has contributed essays to all three recent reference works on Spenser: The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, the Palgrave Companion to Spenser Studies, and the Oxford Handbook to Spenser. For Oxford, he has co-edited Marlowe’s Collected Poems, and for the forthcoming Norton Shakespeare, the “Poems.” A past president of the International Spenser Society, Cheney served as managing editor for the project in its planning stages. For the Spenser Project, Cheney is editing The Shepheardes Calender, Daphnaida, Colin Clouts Come Home Again, Prothalamion, and Book 1 of The Faerie Queene.

Elizabeth Fowler is Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia with expertise in medieval as well as Renaissance literary culture. She is the co-editor of The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World (with Roland Greene; Cambridge University Press, 1997) and author of Literary Character: The Human Figure in Early English Writing (Cornell University Press, 2003), which received an honorable mention for the 2005 MacCaffrey medal from the International Spenser Society. Author of a well-received study of the institutions of personhood as reflected in the law and literature of late-medieval and Renaissance England, she has primary responsibility for editing Spenser’s treatise on English colonial practice in Ireland. For the Spenser Project, Fowler is responsible for editing A Vewe of the Present State of Ireland.

Joseph Loewenstein is Professor of English and directs the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities and the Humanities Digital Workshop at Washington University in St. Louis. He has published The Author's Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright (Chicago, 2002) and Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge, 2002). He has also edited The Staple of News for the Cambridge Edition of the Complete Works of Ben Jonson. He has served on the Executive Committees of both the International Spenser Society, the MLA Division on English Renaissance Literature, and as one of the judges for the MLA Prize for Scholarly Editions. For the Spenser Project, he supervises the text-critical work for the edition and is the chief liaison between the editors and those providing technical support for the project. He also is editing A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings, the Spenser-Harvey correspondence, Complaints, The Faerie Queene, Books IV-VI (1596), and the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie.

David Lee Miller directs project activities at the University of South Carolina, where he is Carolina Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature. He is both a past and current president of the International Spenser Society; he also designed the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama and served as its first director. He currently directs the Center for Digital Humanities at the University of South Carolina, which has received a grant from the NEH to fund Paragon, a project to develop better software for digital collation. The author of Dreams of the Burning Child: Sacrificial Sons and the Father's Witness (Cornell University Press, 2003) and The Poem's Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queene (Princeton University Press, 1988), Professor Miller has contributed a comprehensive discussion of the scholarly and critical traditions surrounding Spenser’s epic for the Palgrave Critical Companion to Spenser Studies. He has also co-edited four collections of essays, including one volume on approaches to teaching The Faerie Queene. For the Spenser Project, he is editing The Faerie Queene Books I-III (1590), Amoretti and Epithalamion, Fowre Hymnes, and miscellaneous poems.

Andrew Zurcher is Fellow in English at Queens' College, Cambridge, and co-director of the AHRC-funded manuscript-digitization project, Scriptorium. Bringing special expertise in paleography and bibliography to the edition, he acts as our glossator and linguistic consultant He works primarily on linguistic and legal topics in the study of Spenser and Shakespeare, and is the author of several articles on Spenser, including "Printing the Faerie Queene in 1590" (Studies in Bibliography 57, 2005-06). Since he is also a leading expert on Spenser’s diplomatic and administrative experience in Ireland, he will edit Spenser’s secretarial correspondence and will prepare a short biography for inclusion in the edition. He has shared in the textual work on the First Part of The Faerie Queene, and will continue to advise on the text-critical matters, especially with respect to the Second Part; he will also edit Mother Hubberds Tale, share in preparing the commentary for Book V of The Faerie Queene, and edit Spenser’s secretarial correspondence. He also is glossator for the project, with a range of other editorial responsibilities.

The general editors are aided by a team of contributing editors and staff:

  • Gordon Braden, Professor Emeritus at University of Virginia, is editing Axiochus. He has written extensively about the relation of Renaissance poetry to Classical sources.
  • Nicholas Canny, Professor of History at the National University of Ireland, Galway, will assist Fowler in editing A Vewe of the Present State of Ireland. Canny is a specialist in early modern English colonial practice in Ireland. He has written or edited nine books on the topics of early modern Ireland and British colonial history, and is current President of the Royal Irish Academy.
  • Douglas Knox (WU) serves as our project manager. He joined the project in 2011, after serving for three years as the Director of Publication and Digital Initiatives at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
  • Annelise Duerden is assisting Professor Fowler with transcriptions of manuscripts of the Vewe. She has served as Assistant Project Manager from 2013 to 2014, having worked on the Spenser Project since 2010.
  • Several other consultants support the print and digital components of the Spenser Project: Stephen Pentecost (WU) is a programmer for the Archive; Andrew Rouner, Director of Digital Library Services at WU, and Erin Davis, Curator of Rare Books at WU, advise the Project on standards, longterm curation, and the digitization of primary materials.

Graduate students and advanced undergraduates at each of the U.S. editors’ four institutions are also involved in several aspects of editorial work.

Finally, the editors receive advice and feedback from an Advisory Board of specialists from England, Ireland, Wales, Canada, and the United States:

  • Nicholas Canny, Professor of History at the National University of Ireland, Galway, where he is also Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Settlement and Historical Change
  • Helen Cooper, Professor of English, Cambridge University, England
  • Patricia Coughlan, Associate Professor of English, University College–Cork, Ireland
  • David Gants, Associate Professor of English, Florida State University, United States
  • Andrew Hadfield, Professor of English, University of Sussex, England
  • A.C. Hamilton, Professor Emeritus of English, Queen's University, Canada
  • David Scott Kastan, Professor of English, Yale University, United States
  • Richard McCabe, Professor of English, Oxford University, England
  • Anne Lake Prescott, Professor of English, Barnard College, United States

The Spenser Archive has received financial, material, and/or intellectual support from the following:

Contributors:

  • The National Endowment for the Humanities
  • Bibliographical Society of America
  • The University of South Carolina
  • Washington University in St. Louis
  • The Pennsylvania State University
  • The University of Virginia
  • The University of Kentucky

Libraries:

  • Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
  • The Harry Ransom Center
  • The Folger Shakespeare Library
  • Washington University Special Collections
  • Boston Public Library
  • Princeton Department of Rare Books and Special Collections
  • University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign University Library
  • The Oxford Digital Library
  • The Bancroft Library at University of California Berkeley