This book takes much of its substance, substantially transformed though it is, from my Ph.D. dissertation, ‘Edmund Spenser and Early Modern Spatial Production’ (University of Cambridge, 2002), a chapter of which was fashioned from my M.Phil. dissertation, ‘“With a Golden Wall”: Castles in The Faerie Queene’ (University of Cambridge, 1999).

The book sits somewhere in the space formed by the connections between the three points of its title – allegory, space, and the material world – and the first two chapters sketch out, as it were, the sides of that triangle. The first chapter talks about matter and materiality, about where we might look in The Faerie Queene for objects, substance, properties, and how this investigation might relate to the recent wealth of critical and theoretical work on early modern material culture and, in particular, Renaissance drama: what this field of study can tell us about the materiality of Spenserian allegory, and how allegory can in turn refine our sense of the way that literature and material culture intersect in the sixteenth century. The second chapter deals with place and space, discussing the spatial qualities of the narrative of The Faerie Queene, and the sense of place in the poem; it asks how these places and objects relate to the world outside the poem, and how we relate its fictional space to the spatial world of the sixteenth century.

The following seven chapters provide, in one sense, readings of different aspects of Spenser's poem in the light of this methodology.