Spenser's 'Amoretti': An edition with notes and commentary

Edmund Spenser's 89 sonnets, Amoretti, appeared in 1595, the year prior to the publication of the second part of the Faerie Queene, in a small format volume with certain anacreonic verses and the Epithalamian, printed by William Ponsonby. The poems taken together provide an account of wooing and marriage which presumably constitutes or reflects the poet's own courtship of and marriage to Elizabeth Boyle.;The 89 sonnets provide rich material for analysis. They reveal themselves as sites of struggle between male and female in which writing and wooing, text and sexuality come together in a social context defined by traditional Christian structures, particularly sacramental marriage.;Read from philological, historical, and feminist perspectives, the poems repay the exhaustive analysis which the editor gives them. They offer important instances of Spenser's developing attitudes toward poetry, religion and sexuality.