A Spenser Chronology sheds new light on the life of the poet Edmund Spenser, a major canonical author whose entire literary career coincides with his vocation as a prominent Elizabethan planter in Ireland. Despite the number of specialist monographs devoted to him and the commendable biography undertaken by A. C. Judson for the Variorum edition of his works, a major gap remains in Spenser studies. This gap arises from the lack of a proper synthesis of the literary and historical lives.

What was Spenser doing when he wasn't writing The Faerie Queene? By bringing together two traditionally distinct strands of scholarship on Spenser and then splicing the English Renaissance literary biography with the early modern Irish historiography, one can reconstruct a fuller picture of the poet than has hitherto been available. Furthermore, this new portrait of Spenser will appeal across two disciplines - literature and history