literature
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Spoilers!
Speaking of Chaucer, here’s a post I wrote on my old blog in January of last year. Enjoy! Canterbury Tales Prologueca. 1400-1410, mssEL 26 C 9, Huntington Digital Library Last spring I had planned to take a class on Chaucer at my local college but that didn’t work out for a number of reasons. To… Continue reading
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Back to school!
Me. I’m going back to school as an undergrad student. When my youngest child graduated homeschool in 2021 I decided to take a French class from our local college. I’d been wanting to study French since I was 13 years old and reading Hercule Poirot stories. And the more I read English literature and history,… Continue reading
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Recommended editions of Spenser’s Faerie Queene
This is the third post in a series. Some of the editions I recommend below come with scholarly essays, but the important thing to keep in mind is what C.S. Lewis says about reading it in his chapter on Edmund Spenser in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. He says that while reading commentaries can… Continue reading
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Strategies for reading Spenser’s Faerie Queene
In my last post I described how I prepared to read aloud Spenser’s Faerie Queene to my children. It took some time, but it didn’t cost me any money at all, as the high quality, literary retellings for children that I used were written over a century ago and are available for free on the… Continue reading
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How to read The Faerie Queene; or, You are already qualified to read Spenser’s masterpiece
Many of you know that last school year I taught a year-long class on Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. To help prepare myself for the classes, I spent hours and hours reading commentaries and scholarly essays on the poem, because I wanted to give my students (mostly adults, but a few high schoolers as well) value… Continue reading