Edmund Spenser is England's first great pastoral poet. In 1579, at about the age of twenty-seven, Spenser inaugurated his literary career by publishing The Shepheardes Calender, a collection of twelve pastoral eclogues each named after a month of the year. The poet began with pastoral in imitation of Virgil, who had published his Eclogues before his didactic poem, the Georgics, and then his epic, the Aeneid. In late antiquity, Suetonius, Donatus and Servius all understood Virgil's career model to be identical with his life pattern, as reported in his epitaph: 'Mantua gave birth to me, the Calabrians snatched me away … I sang of pastures, fields, and princes.' During the Middle Ages, John of Garland accommodated the progressive life-career pattern to a circular cosmic image, the rota Virgilii (Wheel of Virgil), which presents a series of concentric circles divided by three spokes, each demarcating a writing style, a life style, a social rank and corresponding imagery (plant, animal, implement) (fig. I).

In the sixteenth century, Spenser was thus able to understand pastoral as a developmental genre within a Christian universe. His most notable contribution to the form was to yoke the progressive Virgilian career pattern to the circular life pattern of the Christian calendar.