Spenser's 'Shepheardes Calendar' and Protestant Pastoral Satire

Author / Editor
King, John N.

Title
Spenser's 'Shepheardes Calendar' and Protestant Pastoral Satire

Published
Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, ed. Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation. Harvard English Studies, no. 14 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 369-98.

Description
Connects Spenser's "association of pastoral with a Protestant gospel ethos" in "Shepheardes Calendar" with the Renaissance construction of medieval anticlerical satire as proto-Protestant. The spurious attribution of the "Plowman's Tale" to Chaucer and the broader approval of Langland's "Piers Plowman" and its derivatives aligned bucolic pastorals and Protestant ideals, enabling (and enabled by) Spenser's veneration of Chaucer and reflected in his use of the pastoral genre in his "Calendar."

Contributor
Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer, ed.

Alternative Title
Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation.

Chaucer Subjects
Chaucer's Influence and Later Allusion
Chaucerian Apocrypha
Plowman and the Tale