Annotating Time: Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, E.K., and Almanac Culture

• In Event: Spenser's Sustaining Fictions II

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender in the context of time, textual remaking, and the early modern almanac tradition. Positioning E.K.’s printed commentary upon the poem alongside annotated almanacs from the same era, I argue that E.K.’s paratextual apparatus complicates the conservative ideology of the Shepheardes Calender proper. Printed annotatable almanacs invite interruption of normative calendrical time. As such, these almanacs imply that calendars are constructed tools that are useful but ultimately unnatural. When the E.K. annotations of Spenser’s poem gesture towards this tradition of almanac annotation, the printed Shepheardes Calender undermines the very naturalized temporal schema that the poem purports to display. In so doing, the text advances both a non-normative understanding of time and a participatory, revisory model of textual sustainability. This cooperative sustainability resonates, finally, with the queer time performed by the poem and its paratexts.

Author

• Emily Loney, University of Wisconsin–Madison