Thomas Healy, TLS, April 2005
"Essential for all Spenserians, Bart van Es's book has much to recommend it to students of early modern Britain."
Review
Essential for all Spenserians, Bart van Es's book has much to recommend it to students of early modern Britain. (
Thomas Healy, TLS, April 2005 )
... graceful and important book ... Van Es draws impressively on historically-orientated Renaissance studies of the last twenty years or so while bringing to bear sensitive reading of Spenser's own work as the poet grapples with the various modes of understanding history available in Elizabethan England. (
Renaissance Quarterly )
Van Es has taken that next step in historicist analysis of literature: to subject modes of historical thinking to examination and to accord equal respect and attention to literary and historical texts. Van Es finds in Spenser "a profound, playful, and above all multiform sense of the past". Spenser's Forms of History provides an extremely useful overview of modes of Elizabethan historical thinking and provocative guide to thinking about Spenser in relation to multiform Elizabethan historicism. (
Renaissance Quarterly )
