Introduction: Edmund Spenser and Animal Studies

This introduction engages Spenser’s earliest publication, A Theatre for Worldlings (1569), to open up the concerns of Edmund Spenser and Animal Life. It locates Spenser’s writings within discussions of animals and literary form as they are ethically and politically inflected. We make the case that animals have a quality of simultaneity that suspends the need to choose between seeing them as ‘mere’ abstractions or ‘real’ creatures. The introduction then goes on to give an overview of how scholarship on Spenser is in dialogue with the bigger picture of early modern Animal Studies. The final section summarises the chapters that follow.