Review of Caroline McManus, Spenser's Faerie Queene and the Reading of Women.(Book review)

Publication: Early Modern Literary Studies

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COPYRIGHT 2006 Matthew Steggle

Caroline McManus. Spenser's Faerie Queene and the Reading of Women. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2002. 308pp. ISBN 87413 768 3.

Matthew Woodcock

University of East Anglia

matthew.woodcock@uea.ac.uk

Woodcock, Matthew. "Review of Caroline McManus, Spenser's Faerie Queene and the Reading of Women." Early Modern Literary Studies 12.1 (May, 2006) 13.1-6 .

There have been many studies that examine the relationship between Spenser and Elizabeth I, and identify the different strategies deployed throughout The Faerie Queene in addressing the poet's ultimate implied reader. Caroline McManus' book, however, challenges such a narrow conception of Spenser's female audience and focuses on the poet's evident awareness of a non-royal female readership. The originality of McManus' study lies in the attention to the relationship between Spenser's female characters in the poem and the aristocratic women he sought to fashion as readers. Spenser's stated general intention set out in the prefatory letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline', clearly has...

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