But Guyon all this while his booke did read,

Ne yet has ended: for it was a great

And ample volume, that doth far excead

My leasure . . . . (2.10.70.1-4)

The notion of reading pervades The Faerie Queene, and it is frequently connected to perceptual, cognitive, and physical struggles. If the ‘ample volume’ that Guyon reads in Alma’s castle exceeds the narrator’s ‘leasure’, this functions as an allegory not only of the many journeys and quests in The Faerie Queene, but also of the reader’s passage through Spenser’s monumental work. Indeed, Spenser’s poetry repeatedly foregrounds the difficulties of reading or knowing while mapping physical trajectories: ‘Ne soothlich is it easie for to read, / Where now on earth, or how he may be found’ (3.2.14.1-2). As Patricia Parker noted long ago in Inescapable Romance, The Faerie Queene continually defers the end of its spatial and textual paths. This deferral implies a serial logic in which there is always more space to traverse and always more text to read. It is therefore not surprising that the poem repeatedly presents images of endurance and bodily exhaustion: ‘After long wayes and perilous paines endur’d, / Hauing their wearie limbes to perfect plight / Restord, and sory wounds right well recured . . .’ (3.1.1.2-4).

The parallels between the characters’ physical struggles and the reader’s embodied experience of the text become more pronounced when The Faerie Queene is read in its entirety. In 2019, the English department at Tampere University (Finland) organised its first marathon reading of Spenser’s epic romance. The event was repeated in 2022 and 2023, and we have decided to open the 2024 iteration to interested scholars from other institutions. The marathon reading will take place over the course of three days (3-5 May, 9 am – midnight), followed by a one-day symposium on 7 May. We solicit 20-minute presentations that explore the expansive spaces and bodily exertions in/of The Faerie Queene by discussing different forms of endurance, excess, and embodied reading, with the aim of proposing a special issue to The Spenser Review after the event. Presentations may explore The Faerie Queene through, for instance, the following topics and approaches:

• Early modern cultures and theories of reading
• Early modern theories of the body and of embodied experience
• Early modern perspectives on endurance, exhaustion, and regeneration
• Geographies of reading
• Misreading, re-reading and one-directional reading
• Endlessness, expansion, and seriality
• Literary and sensory geographies
• Early modern theories of perception
• Spatial poetics
• The textual journeys and historical endurance of The Faerie Queene

Throughout the event, we will heed Prince Arthur’s warning: ‘Full hard it is (quoth he) to read aright’ (1.9.6.6).

Conference fee

There will be a conference fee of max. 100 EUR. The fee includes lunches and dinners during the marathon reading and lunch on the day of the symposium.

Call for abstracts

Please submit an abstract of 250 words to johannes.riquet@tuni.fi by 23 March 2024. We will notify you of acceptance or rejection by 26 March. While it is possible to attend only the symposium, preference will be given to scholars who wish to take part in the marathon reading as well (please indicate this in your proposal).

The organising committee:

Tamsin Badcoe (University of Bristol)

Antoinina Bevan Zlatar (University of Zurich)

Kevin McGinley (Tampere University)

Johannes Riquet (Tampere University)