Most of the important and useful books appear in the notes of the first
two chapters of Alpers' book. I like Patrick Cullen, Spenser, Marvell
and Renaissance Pastoral, and Helen Cooper's book on Medieval and
Renaissance Pastoral (not the exact title). Lynn Staley Jonson's The
Shepheardes Calender: An Introduction gives a very good sense of the
immediate context of Spenser's early pastoral writing, and the chapters
in the first half of Harry Berger's Revisionary Play do wonderful things
with the ways in which Spenser plays with particular pastoral traditons.
Poggioli's book is unusually useful in giving a sense of certain
tendencies in the mode, although he tends to see individual poems as
being driven by those tendencies rather than examining them. See Lee
Piepho on Mantuan. Bill Oram
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