This monograph is the first comprehensive study of the monsters and monstrous beings in The Faerie Queene. It takes as its starting point Thomas Cooper's sixteenth-century definition of monstrum, which links the monstrous to the notion of the physically deformed, the violation of the rules of nature, and the idea of the sign that needs interpreting. These distinctions also represent Spenser's use of monsters and monstrous beings in The Faerie Queene: he fashions monstrosities as physical deformities violating the rules of nature in order to establish them as meaningful ciphers in an 'extended...