Medieval & Early Modern: Karen Nelson, "Designing Details: The Aesthetics of Selection and Order in Edmund Spenser's SHEPHEARDES CALENDAR"
Medieval & Early Modern: Karen Nelson, "Designing Details: The Aesthetics of Selection and Order in Edmund Spenser's SHEPHEARDES CALENDAR"
This presentation supports the Gradaute Field Committee in Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Other events in this series are posted here.
Karen Nelson is Associate Director of the Center for Literary & Comparative Studies in the Department of English at the University of Maryland.
Abstract:
In the Shepheardes Calendar, first printed in 1579, Edmund Spenser modifies the dialogue form commonly employed for pastoral literature and incorporates a number of innovative embellishments: commentary, images, the calendar form. The framework of the individual elements that he combines into a complicated whole echoes the architectural design of the period and reflects as well many of the heavily ornamented frontispieces from the mid-sixteenth century.
While these embellishments--monthly entries, annotations, emblematic woodcuts, black-letter type, emblems for each speaker, the critical apparatus provided by E.K.--have provided those engaged in Spenser studies with a way to partition and manage the Calendar’s efflorescence, in this essay I consider the composition as a whole and ask how the aesthetics available from architecturally and ornamentally rich graphic designs of the sixteenth century inform this pastoral poetic structure.
I borrow terms from architectural design analysis and apply them to a theoretical consideration of how form makes a historically inflected meaning in Spenser's poetics and how Spenser employs the formal elements to engage with his culture, specifically the 1570s religious-political debates in England. I suggest that Spenser deploys form in such a way that the sequence asks the reader to combine and re-combine details into ever-shifting patterns, each of which formulates a different possible reading of the pastoral world; taken together, these concurrences simultaneously meet, thwart, and explode readers' expectations.
This presentation supports the Gradaute Field Committee in Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Other events in this series are posted here.
Karen Nelson is Associate Director of the Center for Literary & Comparative Studies in the Department of English at the University of Maryland.
Abstract:
In the Shepheardes Calendar, first printed in 1579, Edmund Spenser modifies the dialogue form commonly employed for pastoral literature and incorporates a number of innovative embellishments: commentary, images, the calendar form. The framework of the individual elements that he combines into a complicated whole echoes the architectural design of the period and reflects as well many of the heavily ornamented frontispieces from the mid-sixteenth century.
While these embellishments--monthly entries, annotations, emblematic woodcuts, black-letter type, emblems for each speaker, the critical apparatus provided by E.K.--have provided those engaged in Spenser studies with a way to partition and manage the Calendar’s efflorescence, in this essay I consider the composition as a whole and ask how the aesthetics available from architecturally and ornamentally rich graphic designs of the sixteenth century inform this pastoral poetic structure.
I borrow terms from architectural design analysis and apply them to a theoretical consideration of how form makes a historically inflected meaning in Spenser's poetics and how Spenser employs the formal elements to engage with his culture, specifically the 1570s religious-political debates in England. I suggest that Spenser deploys form in such a way that the sequence asks the reader to combine and re-combine details into ever-shifting patterns, each of which formulates a different possible reading of the pastoral world; taken together, these concurrences simultaneously meet, thwart, and explode readers' expectations.
Art-Sociology Building