The Spenser Project
By Jaime A. Martinez, contributor

University Park, Pa. – The poetry of Edmund Spenser plays an important role in the canon of British literature and influenced generations of English-language authors. His work is of great interest to both experienced scholars and beginning students, but no up-to-date critical edition of his poetry and prose currently exists. The editions of Spenser currently in circulation are extremely antiquated, offering insufficient scholarly commentary, or incomplete, anthologizing only sections of the larger canon. Dr. Patrick Cheney, professor of English and Comparative Literature at Penn State, has begun to remedy this deficit in the canon of print editions. Working in conjunction with David Lee Miller of the University of Kentucky, Joseph Loewenstein of Washington University, and Elizabeth Fowler of the University of Virginia, Cheney plans to collate and edit extant early editions of Spenser's work, prepare critical commentary, and produce a set of three volumes for publication by the Oxford University Press.

?In addition to re-editing Spenser's poetry based on more extensive collating of sources, Cheney and his fellow editors plan to restructure the edition. Rather than dividing the volumes into a hierarchy of major and minor works, the new table of contents will follow original publication dates, so that modern readers will become familiar with Spenser's work in the same way his contemporaries did. Also, the new edition will include Spenser's prose works, especially A View of the Present State of Ireland, which has attracted much attention due to the virulence of Spenser's statements regarding the Irish. The page design of the new edition would conform to that of other editions in the Oxford English Text Series. The re-editing and preparation of critical commentary the editors plan is in itself an ambitious task, but it is only the first phase of a more comprehensive editing project.

In addition to the publication of a three-volume library edition of Spenser's works, which Cheney expects to take place in 2008, the editors hope to produce a single-volume classroom edition and a digital archive for both classroom use and scholarly research. The hope is to produce more affordable and comprehensive volumes for educational purposes so that Spenser's work will not disappear from the college classroom. All of the new editions would include critical commentary that addresses new research into topics such as Protestant allegory and early modern sexuality, topics that provoke intellectual discussion and classroom interest.

?Cheney expects this new edition of Spenser's poetry and prose to be the definitive edition for the next few generations. The editing project will provide an authoritative text of all of Spenser's known works, critical introductions and commentary on Spenser and his work, and serve as a model for future projects, particularly those including digital archives. Because this new edition will make Spenser's work more accessible and researchable, Cheney anticipates that it will prove a significant contribution to the study of English literature.

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Contact: Katherine Bentz, The Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies, at