Spenser's Shameful Shepheardes Calender

This essay argues that the shame of stylistic primitivism is central to Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, which explores the tension between an affiliation with England's linguistic past as a means for shaming the present and as a shameful attachment to a superseded moment in style's evolutionary history. This double perspective on Spenser's conflicted archaism reveals the close bond between style and shame, the social life of style formation and reception, the affectively charged influence of humanism and its stylistic precepts on vernacular literature, and the continued relevance of anachronism as a concept for understanding Renaissance debates over stylistic historicism.