Welcome to the Spenser Archive Finding Aid, a bibliographical database with links to collections all over the world that house sixteenth- and seventeenth-century copies of works by the English poet and colonial administrator Edmund Spenser.
Using the links to your left, you may search this database in a number of complementary ways. We hope this information will prove useful to editors, bibliographers, and curators of collections as well as to private collectors and bibliophiles, students and scholars of the history of the book, and others.
The information in this database has been gathered over many years by dozens of contributors, but more copies remain to be identified and included; it has been checked carefully several times, but errors no doubt persist.
For both reasons we ask users to notify us of errors they may encounter, or of copies to be added.
We will be especially grateful for curators at major repositories who are willing to confirm our description of their holdings, private collectors who are willing to describe their copies to us, and scholars who may find time to check our data against the holdings of repositories to which they have access.
This Finding Aid is the first part of what will eventually be a comprehensive digital archive devoted to the study and teaching of Spenser's works. Supported by funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities together with generous support from Washington University in St. Louis, the University of South Carolina, and the Pennsylvania State University, construction of the Spenser Archive is supervised by the General Editors of "The Collected Works of Edmund Spenser," under contract to Oxford University Press.