Preface:The Ruin of Time is a modern spelling version of the preface to Edmund Spenser’s The Ruins of Time, which will follow in the coming days. Like the vast majority of Spenser scholars, I find this project I have taken up — to create an online, modern English edition of Spenser’s Complaints — to be a little sacrilegious. The way Spenser constructs words is a vital part of his poetry, and by modernizing the spelling of these poems some meaning will be lost. My hope is that the poems are made more widely available to the uninitiated, and that increased interest in these works will compensate for the loss of depth and texture.