In the history of Renaissance sonnet sequences, Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti stands out as a singular experiment. Unlike the famous sequences of Petrarch, Joachim Du Bellay, or Philip Sidney, which project coldness or cruelty onto an absent beloved woman who is more fantasy than fact, Amoretti can be read as the record of Spenser’s courtship with Elizabeth Boyle, who would become his wife.

The first book in Amherst College Press’s Re/verse series, Love’s True Object offers a new account of Spenser’s poetic theory of marriage as conversation, a theory that his verse both represents in its content and form, an interlaced rhyme scheme that is also unique in the history of the sonnet. Conversation, as Spenser knew, can be difficult to disentangle from projection: the interplay of our ideas about someone and that someone’s stubborn particularity. The book’s married co-authors take up Spenser’s proposal that conversation is the cure for the misrecognition that seems endemic to love. But they also explore how Spenser stages those misrecognitions as comic rather than tragic, as prompts for deepening conversation rather than simply errors to avoid.
 

Katie Kadue is assistant professor of English at Binghamton University. She is the author of Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

Ross Lerner is associate professor of English at Binghamton University. He is the author of Unknowing Fanaticism: Reformation Literatures of Self-Annihilation (Fordham University Press, 2019).