A generation has passed since the last prolonged critical effort by New Historicists to connect the poetry of Edmund Spenser to his adoptive colonial home in Ireland, where the English poet, administrator and planter spent much of his mature career writing The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596, 1609), Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595), Amoretti and Epithalamion (1595) and other works.  This talk will re-assess the conclusions of those past studies in the light of more recent historical, material (including archaeological) and digital investigations of Spenser’s Irish milieu, including his adopted home at the medieval castle of Kilcolman, County Cork.  Indeed, how we understand Spenser’s place at Kilcolman helps to determine how we understand Spenser’s place in criticism today:  as an anxious outlier and increasingly little-read if magnificent poet among the ruins of the past, or as a deeply problematic genius and central figure in the burgeoning field of post-colonial and Transatlantic studies.

Thomas Herron is Professor of English at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC, where he has taught since 2005.  He works extensively on Edmund Spenser and Irish history, archaeology and culture, and he has published widely on Shakespeare and other authors. He is former editor of the journal Explorations in Renaissance Culture and co-curator of the exhibit Nobility and Newcomers in Renaissance Ireland at the Folger Shakespeare Library (2013).  Herron’s digital work includes the website Centering Spenser: a digital resource for Kilcolman Castle, which features a model of Spenser’s Kilcolman Castle in Virtual Reality for teaching purposes in different disciplines.