Building a Spenser collection for the ages

QUEEN ELIZABETH I made him England's poet laureate. But the complete works of Edmund Spenser -- whose epic poem, "The Faerie Queene," so dazzled the monarch -- are hard to find these days.

Now, thanks to Oxford University Press, a coterie of Spenserian scholars and a $150,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an updated collection of the English master's prose and poetry is in the works.

Joseph F. Loewenstein, a Renaissance literature expert at Washington University in St. Louis, is leading a team of graduate and undergraduate students to compile, edit, annotate and digitize Spenser's complete oeuvre, including "The Faerie Queene," which vaulted him into the pantheon of English literature.

But Spenser goes "largely unread today," in part because of the "difficulty of his language, which -- like James Joyce's later on -- not only bristles with erudition but also engages in brilliant wordplay, employing archaic words and inventing new ones." ...

•	Building a Spenser collection for the ages Los Angeles Times, Sunday, Jan. 27, 2008 Byline: Kristina Lindgren

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