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Spenser's Amoretti LXII and the Date of the New Year

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Josephine Waters Bennett
Josephine Waters Bennett*
Affiliation:
Sandwich, Illinois
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Extract

Recently a new theory of the structure of Spenser's Amoretti k has been put forward. It is based on the argument that Amoretti LXII refers, not to January 1 but to March 25, 'the day on which the year number is changed' [in Elizabethan times]. This revision of the day's date makes it possible to argue that the forty-seven sonnets from XXII through LXVIII correspond to the Lenten season in 1594, 'including Easter and the six Sundays before Easter.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , Winter 1973 , pp. 433 - 436
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1973

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References

1 Dunlop, Alexander, ‘The Unity of Spenser's Amoretti,’ in Silent Poetry, ed. Fowler, Alastair (London, 1970), pp. 153–169 Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., p. 155.

3 Ibid., p. 154.

4 Anon. Imprinted at London by Thomas Este for John Wally, n.d. STC 22415. There were many printings of this work.

5 Greg, W. W., ‘Old Style - New Style,’ Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, ed. McManaway, James G. et al. (Washington, D.C., 1948), pp. 563–569 Google Scholar.

6 ‘New Year's Day and Leap Year in English History,’ English Historical Review, 55 (1940), 177-193.

7 See note 5, above.

8 The Shepheardes Calender, in Minor Poems, Vol. 1, ed. C. G. Osgood et al. (Baltimore, Md., 1943), p. 14, “our Authour … thinketh it fittest according to the simplicitie of common vnderstanding, to begin with Ianuarie … , “ in The Works of Edmund Spenser, a Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al.

9 All quotations are from Amoretti and Epithalamion. The English Replicas (London, 1927), now published by Columbia University Press for The Facsimile Text Society, New York.

10 For New Year's celebrations see Brand, John, Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, ed. Ellis, Henry, New Edition (London, 1902), 1, 1–20 Google Scholar; and see Cheney, C. R., Handbook of Dates for Students of English History (London, 1961), p. 5.Google Scholar

11 See especially Adam Eyre, ‘A dyurnall, or Catalogue of all my Accions and Expences from the 1st of January, 1646[7],’ in The Yorkshire Diaries, Publications of the Surtees Society, LXV (1877), 84; and see Hobson's recordings of the weather at the beginning of the year, ibid., 286, 302, 324.

12 Ibid., p. 84, Adam Eyre records that on January 1 he and his wife exchanged promises of reform.