Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590–6) occupied an important place in eighteenth-century culture. Spenser influenced almost every major writer of the century, from Alexander Pope to William Wordsworth. What was it like to read Spenser in the eighteenth century? Who made Spenserian books, and how did their owners use and interpret them? The first comprehensive study of all of the eighteenth-century editions of Edmund Spenser addresses these questions through bibliographical analysis, and through examination of the history of the book and of eighteenth-century literature and culture. Within these contexts, Hazel Wilkinson provides new information about the production, contents, texts, and reception of the eighteenth-century editions of Spenser, to illuminate how his cultural presence became so far-reaching. With each chapter structured around a major edition of Spenser's work, this volume provides a timely addition to arguments about the nature of literary history and the growing cult of great writers of the past.

Winner, Isabel MacCaffrey Prize 2020, International Spenser Society

‘A crucial reminder that literary critics and historians alike have much to learn from the study of bibliography and the history of the book when done, as it is here, with evident care, admirable precision, and infectious enthusiasm for its subject.'

N. K. Sugimura Source: The Library

'… a distinguished and learned book … Wilkinson deploys a formidable range of book historian’s skills, allied to a sophisticated awareness of eighteenth-century culture … a serious piece of scholarship … that has been skilfully fashioned into a good story.’

Source: The Times Literary Supplement

'… a tour de force in bibliographical analysis … The discoveries made are too numerous to count … they add considerably to the depth and breadth of our knowledge of Spenser’s reception in the eighteenth century.'

David Hill Racliffe Source: The Spenser (www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline)

‘Wilkinson’s book … should inspire more scholars to bridge the gap between cultural history and bibliography … it will be exciting to see how much more we learn about eighteenth-century reprints of poetry because of the new ground broken in Wilkinson’s book.’

J. P. Ascher Source: Script & Print

‘Hazel Wilkinson argues that The Faerie Queene was the original unread classic: the emblematic textual commodity of an age in which book ownership expanded from the domain of aristocrats and scholars to become a bourgeois expression of taste … Wilkinson’s project traces that Spenserian affect-at once stately and fanciful, imperially grand and appealingly gothic-across the whole of eighteenth-century English culture, from poetry and fiction to architecture, theater, political propaganda, sculpture, painting, and landscape gardening.’

Catherine Nicholson Source: New York Review of Books