Edmund Spenser’s poetry has been a particularly fertile ground for the exploration of word and image. In his The Shepheardes Calender (1579), Spenser exhibited a canny understanding of visual and verbal messaging, from emblems to typeface. And The Faerie Queene has long been cited as an innovative work in pictorialism. The International Spenser Society has selected for a special session three 20-minute interdisciplinary presentations reassessing Spenser’s relationship with and participation in visual culture. The proposed papers engage with the fields of illustration studies, materiality, and book history as they advance new insights on Spenser’s work.

Spenser’s earliest published work appears in A Theatre for Worldlings (1569), a book of poems, illustrations and religious commentary written and compiled by the Low Countries poet and refugee Jan van der Noot. Claire J. C. Eager’s (College of Wooster) paper, “Spenser’s Emblematics of Paradise,” presents findings from Antwerp collections on van der Noot’s approaches to publishing and illustration and traces their influence on Spenser’s first major publishing project in The Shepheardes Calender. She will reveal connections between Theatre and Calender images and texts hitherto unrecognized in previous Spenserian scholarship.

Mathieu D. S. Bouchard (McGill University), in his paper “Louis du Guernier, John Hughes, and the Repackaging of The Shepheardes Calender in 1715,” continues with the woodcuts in The Shepheardes Calender, moving from their generation to their afterlives. After 1611, the original woodcuts were lost, and the next edition of the poem to contain any illustration was the 1715 duodecimo published by Jacob Tonson and edited by John Hughes. The original woodcuts were replaced with a single engraving by Louis du Guernier, the artist who had also crafted the illustrations for Tonson’s edition of Shakespeare. Bouchard explores how Guernier’s engraving was designed not to complement the poem but rather to situate The Shepheardes Calender within an emergent English canon solidified by the book trade.

In Tanya Schmidt’s paper, “Phaedria and Pope Joan,” early modern visual culture helps explicate a thorny textual variant in 1590 and 1596 The Faerie Queene. When describing the character Phaedria, the 1596 edition of The Faerie Queene drops the comparison of Phaedria to Pope Joan. There has not been an extended analysis before of the omission of this simile, and Schmidt has discovered evidence in the visual tradition of representing Pope Joan, including Hartmann Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle (1473) and Boccaccio’s De Claris mulieribus (1473 and 1539)

Together, these papers, from established and early-career scholars, provide new insights on Spenser’s engagement with visual culture, and they deepen our understanding of the often fraught relationship between word and image, reading and seeing.