THIS STUDY has sought to achieve a double aim: to restore to our reading of early modern English poetry the kinds of word-based interpretative strategies that characterized the theory and practice of humanist hermeneutics in the period; and to recover in the poetry of Spenser and some of his closest contemporaries an innovative and significant strain of legal expression, thought, and argument. In modern criticism of the works of Spenser, the breadth and depth of his legal interest have gone almost entirely unremarked; readers have engaged productively with the political theory of Book V of The Faerie Queene, and have lately taken up isolated issues with legal connections – such as complaint and conveyance – but the pervasive and consistent influence of legal language and thought on Spenser's allegorical project in The Faerie Queene, and in the poems that immediately followed its ‘completion’ in 1595, has till now remained, as E. K. feared, passed ‘in the speedy course of reading’. I hope that the recognition and exploration of Spenser's meticulous verbal artistry, on the one hand, and his committed political engagement, on the other, will help to restore a properly historical basis to our understanding of this pioneer of a literary English, and of the influence he exerted on his first readers.