| Summary: | The extensive glossaries accompanying each section of Edmund Spenser's <em>The Shepheardes Calender</em> required explanation, even to Spenser's contemporaries. Including glossaries in non-English texts, such as the works of Virgil, was standard practice, but <em>The Shepheardes Calender</em> was the first example on an English text that included a glossary of English terms. Moreover, there is something particularly unusual about the nature of glossing in this text. Two controversies surround these glossaries: scholars continue to debate both the identity of the mysterious E. K., and the provenance of the "old and obsolete" terms he glosses for Spenser's readership. But whether they believe E. K. to be a Spenserian fiction or a separate editor, scholars agree in situating Spenser/E. K. as a faithful lexicographer who occasionally (and inadvertently) errs in his definitions. Examinations of the glossing in this text typically focus on the nature of E.K.'s explanations of character and symbolism or try to reveal his true identity by matching his use of language against contemporary authors. In this paper, I depart from current approaches by examining how and why E.K. glosses the words he does in The Shepheardes Calender. While it has been argued that, on occasion, E.K. either seems to explain the obvious or appears to mistranslate (most recently by the editors of the Yale Edition of the shorter poems), I contend that E.K. is neither a pedantic nor even a bumbling translator of terms, but is advancing, in effect, a careful agenda: if all glossary making is, by nature, an interested activity, Spenser/E.K.'s agenda is unusually deliberate. Using the origins, usage, and incidence of two glossed words – stoure and coronal – in Early English Books Online and the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary as examples, I reveal how E.K. presents meaning as uncovered rather than created, while assiduously promoting the traditional "Englishness" of Spenser's "harsh tearmes." That is, I argue that E.K. is an insincere glosser: through him, Spenser is deliberately reinventing the English lexicon by means of a constructed "oldspeak"(Maley), employing manufactured meanings to allow himself scope for his own ideological impulses toward both English linguistic purity and literary canonization.
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