The cover of this intelligent book features a photo of an ornate nineteenth-century rococoesque mirror with gilded nymphs, fruit, putti, and curlicues galore. As a reflection of a reflective device in an elaborate frame, the mirror image forms an apt analogy for the contents. Where is the center of this precisely edged, illuminating, and richly allusive book? What might we see in its reflective space? What essential ideas of Spenser will emerge inside the gilded erotic tangle at the edges?

Anderson's book is careful criticism of Spenser's great unspooling, tangled, and “endless work,” The Faerie Queene. Anderson, an allegorical theorist, longtime Spenserian (and Shakespearean and Chaucerian, et al.), and a preeminent literary critic of our time, constructs her textual mirror in part from planed-down and newly elaborated versions of previously published articles on the figurative-allegorical functions of women characters in Spenser's epic. Una, Amoret, Belphoebe, Britomart, Mirabella, and Serena get the most sustained attention; Duessa some. Anderson defends the art of close reading against recent efforts by certain critics to switch gears toward the more formulaic. She puts her verbally sensitive, allusive, and cross-referencing analytical method into action by carefully explaining how Spenser creates “figural being[s]” (7) out of these main characters as the plots develop, almost as if they were actresses on a stage (apt comparisons are made with Shakespeare characters such as Rosalind). Spenser's best characters are not mere tropological cutouts of singular concepts. Una, often plainly typecast in our classrooms as faith and/or the Protestant church, is imbued with passionate life and a parodic identity: she represents a “contingent truth” (27). Some female characters have boundary-bending nuance with one another, as when Amoret and Britomart share the same horse (a symbol of passion). Anderson's “method reflects what happens to mythological sources in their creative revision within the movement of metaphorical narrative” (98), as “modes and cumulative patterns of meaning” accrue (118). Women help bring the actions, emotions, and ideas of the book alive.

Does the allegorical-narrative methodology of character creation that Anderson unravels and analyzes so carefully and so well not apply to male characters also, especially such varied ones as Timias (whom Anderson does in fact consider from various angles)? Spenser's brilliant method of “narrative figuration” here is the true focus of Anderson's scintillating study, but given that fact, why only study the female characters in depth? How essential are they or not to the method? Likewise, one naturally wonders about comparisons with women in Spenser's other poetry, especially (for this reader) the fictionalized Elizabeth Boyle in Amoretti and Epithalamion. Does her figural persona develop in similar ways?

Another problem occurs when Anderson describes historical allegorization as “press[ing]” (64), as if flattening the figurative potential of characters. In this way, Serena suffers the “cancellation” of her “identity as a womanly figure together, ironically, with the destruction of her serenity and, in short, of Serena herself,” if she is read tropically from within various colonial-historical contexts (140). For some critics, however, historicization only adds more petals (some rotten) to the flower. Historicization can itself be richly nuanced and layered (why does Serena have New World and Irish and Throckmortian signification all at once, for example?). We subsequently and rightly hear from Anderson how “socio-cultural” meanings are part and parcel of Mirabella's depth of character (145), as they are certainly for Belphoebe when she allegorizes in various ways the real-mythical Queen Elizabeth I. On that note, the most significant absence in Anderson's analysis (as it is in Spenser's poem) is extended treatment of the summative persona of Gloriana or the Faerie Queene. The mystery abides.

This book is a welcome addition to a new series of Medieval Institute Publications focusing on the early modern period. It has plentiful notes but, to its fault, sorely lacks a bibliography; instead, it has an overly generous number of blank end-pages (sixteen), which cleverly echo the cover: what might be written into this tantalizing space to make it more whole?