The Shepheardes Calender is the poem that launched Edmund Spenser's career and changed the direction of English poetry. In this reappraisal, Lynn Staley Johnson demonstrates that Spenser himself made a self-conscious effort to create a new literature, a new esthetic for a new era. Drawing upon a wide range of primary sources, she places the poem in its literary, social, political, and cultural context, contributing to our understanding of the relationship between Spenser and his times. She pays particular attention to the emergence of the myth of Elizabeth and of England during...