In Spenser's Forms of History, Bart Van Es presents an engaging study of the ways in which Edmund Spenser utilized a number of 'forms of history' - chronicle, antiquarian discourse, secular typology, political prophecy, and others - in both his poetry and his prose, and assesses their collective impact on Elizabethan poetry. Van Es has taken that next step in historicist analysis of literature: to subject modes of historical thinking to examination and to accord equal respect and attention to literary and historical texts. Van Es finds in Spenser "a profound, playful, and above all multiform sense of the past". Spenser's Forms of History provides an extremely useful overview of modes of Elizabethan historical thinking and provocative guide to thinking about Spenser in relation to multiform Elizabethan historicism.