I have no idea where on my bookshelf to put the Spenser Encyclopedia

[bedlamsbard]

For some reason, Twitter is not letting me tweet, so.

OMG. This academic's career is, like, my honors thesis in a nutshell. (Obviously, yes, I am USING HIM AS A SOURCE. He wrote a book called Virgil in the Renaissance, y'all! He runs Virgil.org! His doctoral thesis was on Spenser and the Aeneid!)

Today I found my articles on Spenser and his classical sources the old-fashioned way: I pulled down every copy of Spenser Studies on the shelf and skimmed the abstracts for anything relevant. (I didn't mean to. I was looking at the books on Spenser, and then I looked up and there they were. If I'd looked through every copy of The Spenser Review too, though, I might have been there another hour longer and I couldn't take it any more.) My professor also brought me his copy of The Spenser Encyclopedia, which is huge. I am resisting the urge to haul that + my giant freaking copy of The Faerie Queene into class tomorrow to prove that my topic isn't a fluff topic. (I'm really defensive, okay, and when you have polisci and public health majors whose "so what" in their statement of research is "BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE DYING," "because I want to find out how Spenser used classical sources in his work" doesn't sound quite as punchy. This is a true story, by the way. Her paper sounds quite interesting for something I honestly have no interest in reading.)

...I just realized that Virgil.org has a whole section on Spenser and the Aeneid in the form of a bibliography and I'm having a moment, okay, omg, I just. *flails* And Spenser and all Vergil's other works, and omg, I am sure a lot of people writing theses would kill for someone else to have put together a relevant bibliography, I just. WOW. HA THIS IS WHAT YOU GET FOR HAVING A TOPIC THAT'S BEEN AROUND FOR FOUR HUNDRED YEARS + SIXTEEN HUNDRED MORE take that New Orleans charter schools! (Nothing against New Orleans charter schools, but see again: defensive. Also I was the one in the class who had to ask what the hell a charter school was. Look, the most recent class I've taken in the past year dealt with the first decade of the seventeenth century, okay. In Europe. And that's pushing it for me, I prefer to be a good millennium and a half earlier.)

Anyway, things I have learned through looking through the entire thirty year run of Spenser Studies: there are trends. In the past decade and a half or so, there have been considerably more Spenser + classics papers published, while in the nineties and late eighties there were far more publications on Spenser's non-Faerie Queene work (like The Shepheardes Calender), and when they just started out in 1980 and 1981 there are some publications on things that have nothing to do with Spenser, like Shakespeare.

At least I am content in the knowledge that, as of right now, I have a primary and secondary advisor/reader. (I should, uh, probably ask the Honors Program what their policy is on double majors, though. I'm sure it's been done before, I just want to check because I don't know for sure. On the interesting side: I might end up being the first person ever to write an honors thesis in MEMS.)

Comments

[pinesandmaples]

Technically, I think that's a book you tuck under your pillow.

[bedlamsbard]

I think it's practically the size of my pillow.

[isweedan]

You got a copy!!! YAY.

[bedlamsbard]

My professor brought it into my Shakespeare class, and, like, three people looked at the size of it and flipped. I should take pictures! (Next to my Shakespeare book, my Spenser book, and ordinary sized books.)