This is the first collection of Spenser's shorter poems to offer modernised spelling and punctuation, thus placing the poet alongside his contemporaries - amongst them Sidney, Shakespeare, and Donne - as a writer who can now be read and understood by modern readers without the obstacles of archaic spelling and punctuation artificially obscuring his meaning.

Spenser's celebrated manifesto poem, The Shepherds' Calendar (1579), together with its original prefatory material and the contemporary glosses by E.K., appears here for the first time in a modernised form, but with the conscious archaisms and dialectal forms retained so that it can now, for the first time since it was published, be read as the linguistic palimpsest Spenser intended it to be.

Each poem is prefaced by a headnote explaining occasion, genre, sources, theme, and current critical debate, which, together with the detailed footnotes, allows the reader to place each work in its critical and historical context. Aimed at undergraduate as well as postgraduate readers, this groundbreaking edition will make the richness and variety of Spenser's shorter poems truly accessible to the modern reader.