Spenser described his allegorical epic to his friend Walter Raleigh as an alternative to straightforward moral and religious teaching. This book seeks to put Spenser’s project in context by introducing readers to Spenser’s reference point—16th century sermons, homilies, and liturgies—particularly their use of biblical types for contemporary individuals and concerns. In contrast to deconstructive, gender-based, or psychoanalytic studies, this book attempts to read The Faerie Queene as its first readers might have done. Sermon studies by A. F. Herr, Peter Blench, Millar MacLure, and Peter McCullough and his collaborators are useful guides; many printed sermons are available on the database Early English Books Online. An outline of the book’s nine chapters and acknowledgements close the introduction.

In the 1980s and 1990s, at the height of the so-called 'theory wars' between traditional and theoretical approaches to literature, the notion of close reading was treated with great suspicion. It is perfectly possible to read poetry without reference to any specified literary theory. The use of theory can help us to appreciate and enjoy poetry and see unfamiliar aspects of it. To illustrate this, this chapter discusses three poems about women. The three poems show women working in 'extreme' occupations, raising issues about 'gender roles', among other things. The three poems are 'The Peepshow Girl', 'The Interview with the Knife-Thrower's Assistant' and Gun Girl Chicago 1929. As a way of reading this poem with theory, the chapter draws upon works of art history, art theory, literary theory, film theory or feminist theory.

This chapter considers how time and place are represented in poetry. It presents two well known Victorian elegiac poems, one by Tennyson, and one by Matthew Arnold. The chapter investigates the precise nature of certain poetic effects. Tennyson's In Memoriam sequence, comprising 133 poems, was written over a period of 17 years following the death of his university friend Arthur Hallam. Matthew Arnold's poem 'Thyrsis' was written in memory of his friend and fellow poet Arthur Hugh Clough, with whom he had shared his undergraduate years at Oxford. The elegy is in many ways a puzzling form of poetry, but a key motif is always to seem to want to suspend time and circumstance. The unsettling of notions of time and place in poetry is particularly marked in the case of elegiac poems, for the dichotomy between absence and presence is also deconstructed as a consequence of the chronotopic disturbance.

From detailed study of a number of Burley’s texts ranging from William Browne’s epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke to Overbury’s prose ’Characters’, the proposition that many such texts were inscribed from memory is developed. Memorised texts have hitherto normally been mistrusted as sources of authority, but it is shown here how they may indeed be closer to the original than some scribal copies. The implications of this possibility for the establishment of ‘best’ texts for some literary works are discussed, and it is concluded that Burley has something to offer in this regard, particularly for several of the works of John Donne. A discussion of the role of memorisation in Renaissance education shows that to memorise with reasonable accuracy even long prose texts would have required neither prodigious skill nor abnormal behaviour on the part of either the scribe or the person providing the copy-text for or dictating what the scribe wrote.

When the Spanish invasion force of 1588 met with successful English resistance and disastrous weather, losing thousands of men and 62 of 130 ships, contemporary observers and participants on both sides believed the outcome reflected God’s intervention. English sermons used Bible stories to develop a patriotic and providentialist interpretation of the gathering threat and subsequent Spanish defeat. Sermons before the attempted invasion, by Thomas Drant, Meredith Hanmer, and William Gravet, demonstrate the comparison preachers drew a between Islam and Roman Catholicism (as Spenser created a Muslim sultan to represent the Roman Catholic Spanish threat). Sermons celebrating the English victory, by John Prime, Thomas White, Roger Hackett, and Stephen Gosson, show that Spenser and the preachers drew on the same biblical theme of God’s judgment and motifs of horses, chariot, and hardware.

This introduction to the book discusses seventeenth-century medical and spiritual contexts for the ten women's works that follow, highlighting the importance of studying representations of physicality and illness in works that sought, predominantly, to communicate the vividness of religious experience, as well as exploring the significance of religious beliefs and biblical allusion in medical treatises. The introduction is divided into five sections that discuss: the different ways in which the relationship between flesh and spirit was understood; the relationship between sin and childbirth (as well as illness and miscarriage); the seventeenth-century political and religious climate and understandings of providence; the relationship between conversion, health, and wellbeing; and a discussion of the circumstances that allowed or encouraged women's writing.

This chapter talks about the textual genesis of the poem, including how it came to be written, how it modifies the generating facts, and how it reached its final form. It is possible to identify two opposed views on the matter. The first is based upon an evolutionary model of text production, seeing publication as the birth of the text, before which is an avant-texte period corresponding to embryonic growth. The second view of textual genesis is rather different. It views instability and the existence of multiple variations as the fundamental condition of the literary text, seeing, not a succession of drafts, each getting closer and closer to the final canonical text, but a network of notionally equal versions. The chapter ends with a more general comment on textual genesis.

Preachers had reminded the queen of her own mortality from time to time throughout her reign: Thomas Drant in 1570, Richard Curteys in 1575, the anonymous "L.S." in 1593, and Anthony Rudd in 1596. In the context of the memento mori sermon, the Cantos of Mutabilitie, in particular the two stanzas of the "unperfite" eighth canto, emerges as a nunc dimittis in Elizabeth’s voice, meant to be understood as the queen’s response to Mutabilitie’s challenge and Nature’s vindication of Cynthia. The pun on Sabaoth/Sabbath in the final line echoes a pun in a 1589 Accession Day sermon by Thomas White (Elizabeth/Eloi Sabaoth/Eloi Sabbath), preached and printed while Spenser was in London overseeing the 1590 publication of The Faerie Queen.

This chapter is about poems in which aspects of their overall shape are in some way representational or pictorial. One of the earliest practitioners of this kind of poetry in English was George Herbert, whose book The Temple contains well known examples such as 'The Altar' and 'Easter Wings'. The chapter suggests three basic categories of poems: the verbal/visual type; the visual/verbal kind; and the visual/verbalist kind. It considers three examples of each of these three types. The examples of the verbal/visual type include George Herbert, Guillaume Apollinaire and Edwin Morgan. The examples of the visual/verbal kind include Bob Cobbing, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Ana Maria Uribe. The examples of the visual/verbalist kind include Mary Ellen Solt, David Miller and Alvaro de Sa.

This chapter comprises an introduction to Puritan writer Elizabeth Major and her published work, selected reading, and the edited text of her Honey on the Rod: Or a Comfortable Contemplation for One in Affliction (1656). Major suffered a debilitating illness in her mid-twenties that left her lame and in pain, and the title of her work showed that she saw this affliction as a correction from God's chastising ‘rod’, but that these sufferings were sweet because she was brought closer to him. This process is celebrated by her writings, which include a dialogue between ‘Soul’ and ‘Consolation’ and several poems.

This chapter marks second Stuart successions 1625 in poems, by some of the greatest writers of the age. These writers include John Rous, James Shirley, John Donne, and George Eglisha. The succession of 1625 was in most respects extremely straightforward. Indeed one of the great attractions of the Stuarts in 1603 was that James had three children, including two boys, as a result virtually securing a clear dynastic line of succession. In the series of conflicts that would become known in retrospect as the Thirty Years War (1618-48), James I had positioned himself as a monarch committed to peace. But King Charles was determined to take a different stance. At the death of James, observers watched keenly for signs of Charles's intentions; and his shift in subsequent years away from his father's Calvinism, towards doctrines loosely labelled 'Arminian', in many respects precipitated the national divisions of the 1630s and 1640s.

This chapter comprises an introduction to Lady Mary Carey's manuscript writings, selected reading, and the edited text of her ‘Meditations and poetry’ (1647-57). Carey's manuscripts were possibly circulated as an example of pious parliamentarianism. Extracts included are from her conversion narrative/mother's legacy titled ‘A Dialogue betwixt the Soul, and the Body’ (1647), elegies by Carey and her husband on the death of their son Robert (1650), Carey's elegy on the death of her son Peregrine (1652), meditations (c. 1657), and her most well-known poem, ‘Upon the Sight of my abortive Birth the 31st of December 1657’ which describes an early miscarriage. Her writings express desperation at her sufferings, struggling to interpret God's providence in her illnesses and the loss of five children, but conclude that bodily suffering is ultimately a sign of God's love.

A considerable mystique has gathered around the notion of the image in poetry, but the idea of the image is not in itself complex. A basic definition of the poetic image would be that it is an evoked object which is used to suggest an idea. In his book How to Read a Poem, Terry Eagleton considers the famous image which opens 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', the first poem in T. S. Eliot's first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations of 1917. Eagleton sees this image as typifying the impact of modernism. Thomas Wyatt was the first English poet to make extensive use of the sonnet form, which he had encountered as a youthful aristocratic traveller in Italy. All the images in Wyatt's poem are readily comprehensible because they keep the object and the idea so rigorously separate.