401.31 Book IV, Canto i, stanza 31 611.11:3 Book VI, Canto xi, stanza 11, line 3 503.2-9 Book V, Canto iii, stanzas 2 to 9 503-4 Book V, Cantos iii-iv 207.0 Book II, Canto vii, Argument 100.3 Book I, Proem, stanza 3 500.1:2-4 Book V, Proem, stanza 1, lines 2-4
In addition, a line of the Introductory Matter is specified by its number, preceded by a colon and a capital "I". For example, "I:123" refers to line 123 in the Introductory Matter.
HOW THE GLOSSARY WORKS
Entries relating to each line of Shadow Text are shown below that line. In cases where a glossed word appears more than once in a line, plus signs are used if necessary to highlight the particular word being glossed. For example, in the line:
Till some end they find, +or+ in or out,
it is the first "or" which is glossed.
Editorial policy in the Glossary is as follows. Words which appear in modern concise dictionaries and whose meanings are unchanged are rarely glossed. The reader is expected to understand words such as "quoth", "hither", and "aught" in their modern senses. Where an apparently modern form has a different contextual meaning, it is glossed; and where the modern sense is also to be understood, this is included in the definition. Similar senses are grouped with commas; changes in sense are indicated by semicolons. For example:
sad > heavy, heavily laden; sad
The commoner obsolete forms have been silently converted: "thee" to "you", "dost" to "does", "mought" to "might", "whenas" to "when", and so on. Others (generally speaking, those less common words sufficiently distinct from their modern counterparts to merit a separate entry in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary) have been unified to the spelling preferred by that and its parent dictionary. This should allow the reader, during very close scrutiny of any passage, quickly to find any of Spenser's words in the OED.
All the Glossary entries are context-sensitive: Spenser often uses the same word in several different ways. Thus no single Glossary entry should be taken as generally definitive.