tion in the form of a 100-year gap. It has been pro-
posed that missing manuscripts could have been
preserved in monastic libraries in Southwest England.
Indeed, a manuscript of the The Siege of Jerusalem has
been linked to the priory at Bolton, Yorkshire. The
manuscripts’ delicate nature suggests there are missing
manuscripts that, if found, would provide important
clues about the development of Middle English alliter-
ative poetry. However, given the limited number of
extant and available manuscripts, it is diffi cult to draw
fi rm conclusions about the composition and preserva-
tion of these poems.
Some scholars have suggested abandoning the term
alliterative revival altogether, since there is a great deal
of alliterative prose and poetry that encompasses the
period 1250–1350. Little of it is of the formal style
(nonrhyming, with the aa, ax alliteration pattern) and
therefore it has been dismissed as unrelated to its mid-
14th-century predecessor (although, paradoxically,
some who dismiss these precursors also, in turn, argue
that they are a source for the mid-14th-century form).
Others are disturbed by the nationalistic assumptions
behind the idea of a “revival” that challenges French
language and culture, and see this theory as more a
refl ection of modern politics than of 14th-century lit-
erary practice. Recently, one scholar has suggested that
this diverse group of poems is connected by broader
thematic interests, including an examination of the
complicated relationship between the past and the
present, an engagement with pressing social and cul-
tural issues, a suspicion of romantic love, a reliance on
Latinate sources, and an authoritative and confi dent
narrative voice.
See also GAWAIN-POET.
FURTHER READING
Chism, Christine. Alliterative Revivals. Philadelphia: Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
Turville-Petre, Thorlac. Alliterative Poetry of the Later Middle
Ages: An Anthology. Washington: Catholic University
Press; Padstow, Cornwall: TJ Press, 1989.
Zimmerman, Harold C. “Continuity and Innovation:
Scholarship on the Middle English Alliterative Revival.”
Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik 35, no. 1 (2003):
107–123.
Diane Cady
AMORETTI (OVERVIEW) EDMUND SPENSER
(1595) EDMUND SPENSER’s Petrarchan SONNET
SEQUENCE Amoretti was one of his later works, pub-
lished in 1595, the year after his marriage to Elizabeth
Boyle, the only partially imaginary inspiration for the
piece. It consists of a dedication, introductory poem,
89 SONNETs, and four shorter pieces detailing Cupid’s
intervention in the love experience. The sonnets follow
a male lover’s seemingly conventional pursuit of his
female beloved, culminating in a disappointment and
followed by a four-part poem labeled anacreontics (sex-
ual love). The anacreontics present very conventional
portraits of the relationship between Cupid and the
lover, drawn from Marot, Tasso, Theocritus, Alciati,
and two MADRIGALs. However, Amoretti was published
along with a very different EPIC poem, EPITHALAMION,
following the triumph of the lover’s wedding day with
his beloved, from his predawn preparations through
the evening and day and into the early hours of the
next morning, so readers of the combined work need
not feel their disappointment for long. In fact, Amoretti
(Italian for Cupids) both incorporates and violates the
conventions for the lover’s sonnet sequence common
in the 16th century and in Epithalamion (Greek term
for a wedding song), which traditionally celebrated the
wedding of kings or nobility, and is told from the per-
spective of an observer, not the lover himself.
Amoretti and Epithalamion were published in 1595,
shortly before the expanded FAERIE QUEENE, books 1–6
(1596). Spenser’s own progress through this larger
work is noted in Sonnet 80 (fi t for the handmaid of the
Faerie Queene), giving rise to one interpretation of the
Amoretti as poems about being a poet. The earliest crit-
ics of this work, other poets, tended to focus on certain
pieces as the core of their interpretation. Some went so
far as to recommend that certain sonnets be discarded;
in one case, 18 of the 89 sonnets were considered
worthless imitations, and in another it was recom-
mended that the anacreontics be ignored. Amoretti’s
measure is taken in relation to Italian precursors such
as Dante’s La Vita Nuova and English ones such as SIR
PHILIP SIDNEY’s ASTROPHIL AND STELLA, and it has been
found wanting. But more recent critics have looked for
the logic of the entire piece and explicated it in terms of
representations of human and supernatural time, theAMORETTI 11