Edmund Spenser has been well served by the age of handbooks. The Spenser Encyclopedia (1990), now almost thirty years old, is still an excellent resource for the poet and the literary culture of the period; there is a fine Cambridge Companion (2001), edited by Andrew Hadfield, and more recently, Richard McCabe's Oxford Handbook (2010). Now Andrew Escobedo has edited a volume of thirty-seven short essays with the title Spenser in Context. Its claim to shelf space in such good company rests of course on the individual essays, assembled from a distinguished collection of scholars and critics, but also on their distinctive genre. Each runs to about ten pages, longer than the typical encyclopedia entry, shorter than the full-dress, journal- or chapter-length contributions to the Oxford Handbook. Most have a little more of the assay about them, an improvisatory, sometimes idiosyncratic attempt at a big question. When the form works best, its economy provokes the authors to use ingenious, sometimes polemical examples—the necessary generalizations are made swiftly, and the cases, which cannot hope to be comprehensive, surprise. The result in aggregate is unusually lively reading.

A good example is Gordon Teskey's essay on “Renaissance Literary Theory.” He offers a useful summary of the classical and Italian backgrounds, but the middle of the essay is a polemical promotion of the “Letter to Raleigh,” which he takes to be second only to Sidney's Defense as a specimen of English theorizing. The comparisons between the two (especially between Sidney's “mimetic enhancement” and Spenser's allegory) are illuminating. Another example, of a different kind, is Andrew Zurcher's treatment of “Publication and the Print Marketplace.” Information about the practicalities of bookmaking and trading is organized around a meditation on the poet's anxieties about the fragility of material texts. John Curran's account of “Poetical History” frames its treatment of The Faerie Queene with an account of the period modes that the poem does not engage: historical ethopoeia, bardic antiquarianism, and (with the exception of a few discrete episodes) genealogy or chronology.

The collection also benefits from attention to topics that earlier volumes omit. There are separate essays devoted to Plato and Platonism and to Aristotle and the virtues; the editor's philosophical interests are felt not only in his own essay (on literary character), but throughout. Virgil, Ovid, Petrarch, and Chaucer all get treatments of their own, and a useful essay by Mary Ellen Lamb focuses on Spenser's relationship to the Sidney circle. Some of the most idiosyncratic contributions cluster near the end: Susannah Brietz Monta on “Saints, Legends, and Calendars,” a topic important in itself and as background for the poem's numerologies (a candidate topic for some future handbook), as well as Ayesha Ramachandran on cosmography and Julian Yates on ideas of ecology.

As a whole, the volume does not have a polemic to prosecute. Its organization—the essays above fall into sections on “Spenser's Environment” (including his schooling, patronage, and time in Ireland), “Genre and Craft” (epic, pastoral, romance, the Bible, rhetoric, satire, allegory), and “Influences and Analogues” (other authors, as well as philosophy, theology, and other topics)—is small-c catholic. Still there may be something to be said about the way the collection wears its title. Fifteen years ago, the rubric of context would have implied an emphasis on political and social history. That has changed. Joseph North's recent history of literary studies (Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History [2017]) raises important questions about how the contextualist paradigm in scholarship has overshadowed criticism as a potentially radical enterprise. Spenser in Context is inevitably, as a handbook, tipped toward scholarship—one would not wish it otherwise—but the varieties of criticism for which it has a place are many. Its idea of context includes not only politics but also ideas and other authors. Throughout, there is something close to a shared assumption that Spenser's imagination is not so much determined by these contexts, as by putting them to use; or at least, dialectically entangled in ways that allow the author a healthy share of creative agency. The title Spenser's Resources might have been just as accurate. The short, pointed form of these essays has allowed many of the volume's authors their own imaginative freedom. This gives their work a collective sense of enargeia, and makes it especially useful, as resource and example, for the ongoing work of Spenserian criticism.