ENG 304-A - Spenser's Faerie Queene in the Archives: Home

The above image shows an engraving from "The Gallery of Portraits" Vol. IV, by Charles Knight (London, 1835).

The image above shows the title page of a 1590 edition of Edmund Spenser's epic poem. This volume of the Faerie Queene is housed in the special collections of the University of Glasgow in Scotland. It was one of the works in the university library's original collection.

One of the stated aims of this course is to "...help you build and refine your critical reading, writing and thinking skills by helping you develop your research skills." This library guide was designed to assist that development by providing you with easy access to a variety of Databases we will use for the study of Spenser's Faerie Queene. These resources will include tools that are familiar (Google and Wikipedia) and those that are less so (Early English Books Online and the Hanover Historical Texts Project).

Over the course of the semester, we will discuss where we will look for Databases and how to assess their reliability. We will begin by "Googling" and move on to more sophisticated searches in subject-specific databases and digital archives. It is our hope that as your understanding of Spenser and his epic poem grows so too will your ability to be a discriminating researcher.

This guide is divided up into four parts which correspond to the four research modules of the course as outlined in the syllabus. You can link to each of those parts using the navigational tabs at the top of the page. Here is a brief description of what you'll find on those pages:

• Contextual Exercises - This research module will be our first outing with Databases. We will search Google and explore Wikipedia entries. We'll evaluate our search results and discuss how using advanced search functions and examining Wikipedia's "back end" can add breadth to our search and, hopefully, lead to the discovery of valuable resources. 
• Textual, Bibliographic and Material Issues of the Text - We will discuss how literary texts are constituted and what kind of research goes into making literary texts. Do differences in texts lead to textual instability and uncertainly of meaning? We will examine Spenser's works and texts from the same historical period using digital archives such as Early English Books Online, Google Books, Project Gutenberg and other full-text sources of historic texts.
•  The History of Criticism - Who was reading Spenser in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries? What were they saying about his work? In this research module we will look at what concepts (politics, nation, family) were important to early readers of Spenser. During this module, you will be introduced to a number of resources that will serve as finding aids to seventeenth century critics and criticism. Those resources include The English Short Title Catalog, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, MLA Bibliography, British Printed Images to 1700 and 19th Century Masterfile. You will then use Google Books, the Internet Library of Early Journals and other sources to find digital facsimiles of those original articles.
• Contemporary Scholarship - You will be assigned to groups, each of which will be responsible for a different field of knowledge that will help contribute to the larger questions posed by the course. You will use a variety of Databases, including the library's databases, to access relevant scholarly journals such as Spenser Studies, Milton Quarterly and MLA Bibliography.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me. I'm looking forward to spending the semester with you.

Patricia McPherson, Reference Librarian          508-565-1844          pmcpherson@stonehill.edu