Edmund Spenser’s enormous Elizabethan poem is notoriously beautiful and notoriously difficult to enter, however this beautiful and unusual illustrated edition tries to open the door without pretending the original is straightforward. 

Douglas Hill retells The Faerie Queene in modern prose, following its knights through an allegorical landscape of enchanted forests, monsters, false lovers, sorcerers, temptations and elaborate moral tests. Each knight embodies a virtue, but Spenser’s world is messy with political allegory, Arthurian romance, Protestant theology, classical myth and sheer high frequency fantasy. 

The prose adaptation is accompanied by a dense selection of paintings, manuscripts, engravings and other historical imagery, placing Spenser’s invented world beside the visual culture from which it emerged. It isn’t a substitute for reading the poem’s extraordinary language, but it is a genuinely useful way into its architecture—and an appealing book in its own right for readers interested in Renaissance literature, myth, allegory and the long prehistory of modern fantasy.

Newsweek Books / Russell Sharp Limited, 1980. Hardcover with illustrated pictorial boards. Illustrated throughout in colour and black-and-white. Handwritten gift inscription to title page, dated 1983. Light rubbing and shelf wear to boards and edges, with minor corner wear; internally clean and well bound. Very good condition overall.