  The local-field renormalization of the spontaneous emission rate in a
dielectric is explicitly obtained from a fully microscopic
quantum-electrodynamical, many-body derivation of Langevin-Bloch operator
equations for two-level atoms embedded in an absorptive and dispersive, linear
dielectric host. We find that the dielectric local-field enhancement of the
spontaneous emission rate is smaller than indicated by previous studies.
