From its opening pages, filled with a conceptually and linguistically dense reading of three stanzas of Edmund Spenser's The Fairie Queene, Andrew Zurcher's Spenser's Legal Language: Law and Poetry in Early Modern England makes plain its intense investment in Spenser's language. While other works examining law and literature in early modern England often tend to take an expansive and at times loose view of terms such as “law” and “power,” Zurcher works with more of a poet’s—and perhaps a lawyer’s—ear, pursuing the precise meanings of individual words across their appearances in Spenser's work in order to reveal a web of linguistic associations that, together, demonstrate their author's deep concern with balancing the rights of sovereign and subject. The result is an intriguing though at times dense volume that seeks to develop in its own readers habits of thought that Spenser and his contemporaries shared but that have since been lost.

Zurcher lays the foundation for his argument in chapter 2, in which he explores a tradition of legal reading and writing drawn from both early modern humanism and more classical considerations of the law's mediatory function within civil society. Arising in concert with this tradition were reading habits that were “profoundly influenced by the culturally conspicuous legal reading practices of sixteenth-century England” (18). The result of these influences, Zurcher argues, is that Spenser could have expected a readership attuned to the importance of etymology, analogy, repetition, and other forms of contextual reading, the sum of which amounted to the “dominance of meticulous philology” (35).

Zurcher then proceeds to explore how Spenser, in adapting such patterns of reading to The Fairie Queene, drew upon a host of interpretative possibilities for legal diction. Examples presented here range from technical legal terms whose meanings are often lost on modern readers (the text helpfully includes a basic glossary) to those with a more quasi-legal status. Zurcher's initial survey of these usages may very likely feel overwhelming to readers, who will encounter long strings of terms without the contextual evidence that would render apparent their legal significance. Page 58, for example, contains over a hundred boldfaced words and phrases that could possess legal connotations, in this case drawn from the world of commerce. It would be impossible to do justice (if one pardons the pun) to each of these, so at least initially Zurcher remains intent on offering interpretative possibilities rather than certainties.

The remainder of Zurcher's book, however, is devoted largely to establishing how Spenser used such linguistic resources in The Fairie Queene to develop a sustained reflection on how an early modern writer might deploy the law as a means toward rethinking the jurisdictional boundaries, obligations, and rights of both monarchs and subjects. Zurcher's interpretations of the poem's first books emphasize more abstract and individual considerations, first of social bonds and then of the relative disposition of justice, equity, and mercy. Increasingly important to Zurcher's reading of the poem is the notion of “courtesy”—not in its association with courtiership per se but in how courtesy, through its links with both equity and honor, provides a language for considering the relationship between the queen and her ministers. Examining the challenges between knights that mark much of the action in the poem, for example, Zurcher demonstrates how Spenser insists that the exercise of sovereign power must remain bounded to the law for social order to be maintained.

Courtesy in this sense is about maintaining a social peace defined in part by the proper, if at times limited, exercise of regal and judicial power. Spenser's further elaboration on this assertion—one that moves the poem into more immediately topical arguments—is that, as Zurcher details, if there are those who exist outside of the social fabric, these same bounds need not apply. This conclusion allows Zurcher to explore how Spenser's experiences and philosophies regarding Ireland influence the depiction of not only those topical references long recognized by the poem's critics but also the brigands and cannibals of book 6 as well as the great debates that occur in the poem's unfinished “Mutabilitie Cantos.” To its credit, Zurcher's argument here feels like a seamless development of the poem's main aims rather than an awkward or discontinuous historical digression, almost as if (though Zurcher does not explicitly say so) Spenser found in Ireland the ideal test case for an ethos long in development.

Following this careful reading of The Fairie Queene and Spenser's other works, including The Shepheardes Calender and A View of the Present State of Ireland, Zurcher includes a chapter on how Spenser's combination of poetry and English law helped establish “a new rhetorical register for politically engaged poetry,” which was taken up by William Shakespeare and John Donne (203). Although offering insightful readings of individual poems and the development of the sonnet sequence, Zurcher's argument here feels a bit limited, especially when placed against the slow, careful, and intensive accumulation of detail that has occupied the rest of the book.

In sum, this is a passionate book, written by an author clearly appreciative of—and sensitive to—Spenser's poetic craft and the intellectual and linguistic choices that undergird it. It is also, perhaps by necessity, a difficult and challenging book, especially for those modern readers attuned more to broad readings than to intensive and at times even minute analysis. In its very construction, which generally emphasizes the development of broader political conclusions only as deductions from extensive textual readings, Zurcher seems intent on developing in his own readers the kind of philological analysis he contends Spenser's first readers possessed. While there are suggestive moments in Spenser's Legal Language that open up areas for further criticism—for example, how political and physical boundaries might yield a “topography of allegiances”—this is thus a book that must be read through rather than simply mined in order for it to be fully appreciated (196).