Chapter 1. Introduction : Edmund Spenser and Animal Studies -- Chapter 2. Did Edmund Dream of Shorthaired Sheep? -- Chapter 3. Spenser, Marine Life, and the Metaphysics of Extinction: Overfishing and the True Monsters of the Deep -- Chapter 4. The Politics of Hunting: An Aristotelian Reading of Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti 67 -- Chapter 5. Errour’s Repercussions: Dragons, Race, and Animality in The Faerie Queene -- Chapter 6. Spenser’s ‘apish crue’: Aping in Prosopopoia or Mother Hubberds Tale -- Chapter 7. Scorned Little Creatures?: Insects and Genre in Complaints (1591) -- Chapter 8. Spenser’s Parenthetical Butterflies -- Chapter 9. Good to think [with]’: Spenser’s Animals Against Materiality -- Chapter 10. A Fruitful-Headed Beast?: Rhyme in The Faerie Queene -- Chapter 11. Coursers and Courses in The Faerie Queene -- Chapter 12. Spenser’s Wings -- Chapter 13. Coda.

This book is the first extended critical study of the early modern poet Edmund Spenser from the perspective of animal studies. With an introduction situating Spenser in current discussions of animal life and literary form, and early modern animal studies, the book proceeds in four sections: “Animals and Cultural Practices”; “Animals, Slavery, and Race”; “Animals in Complaints”; “Readers and Poetics in The Faerie Queene”. Contributors discuss a broad range of Spenser’s work, putting it into dialogue with a number of early modern discourses, including politics, poetics, and natural history.