'The loadstarre of the English language': Spenser's 'Shepheardes Calender' and the Construction of Modernity

Author / Editor
Kuskin, William.

Title
'The loadstarre of the English language': Spenser's 'Shepheardes Calender' and the Construction of Modernity

Published
Textual Cultures 2.2 (2007): 9-33.

Description
The prefaces to Spenser's "Shepheardes Calendar" (1579) and to Thomas Speght's "Workes of Chaucer" (1598) share similarities with Lydgate's" Fall of Princes" and thus belie the claims made for a break in continuity with the past in sixteenth-century England, indicating instead a seamless "textual culture" across the period between the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Chaucer Subjects
Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations