Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature Mary Baine Campbell (bio) Jennifer Munroe , Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2008, 146 pp. $99.95 cloth. Those of us engaged in the study of early modern culture are lucky to have Ashgate, and lucky as well to have the series in which this book was published, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. But there are serious flaws in this particular book's production, which does not do justice to the work of its author. I'll begin with complaints about that, before passing on to a description of its usefulness and interest for the fields of cultural, literary, and gender history. Jennifer Munroe's book has not been edited, copyedited, or even properly proofread, and the quality of its important images is so poor that they appear to be the result of a malfunction in the software used by the printer; except for the one happily reproduced on the cover, the images are so crudely reproduced that one cannot at times even make out the details to which the text draws our attention. There are words missing on almost every page, rendering some sentences unintelligible. The results distract attention and slow, sometimes even baffle, the reading. The text itself has not been edited to bring it much past the thesis stage, and it manifests problems more typical of the penultimate version of a dissertation than of a published book, such as the failure to begin discussion of a poem with a brief description of its size, structure, and narrative. Perhaps the latter are signs of the enforced rush to publish in advance of a tenure decision, rather than Ashgate's failure to edit. I register here my sorrow that the strongly worded pleas of both academic publishers and a recent president of the Modern Language Association, Stephen Greenblatt, have gone unheard by Professor Munroe's university—hardly the only university in the United States that is ignoring the necessity for the scholarly world of having properly finished and edited monographs on which to depend for the ongoing work of our fields. The text is a useful and interesting synthesis, enriched by archival work and visits to extant country homes from the period, of work on the diverse materials drawn together here: the early modern history of gardening and the related though differently gendered art of embroidery, the ambitious poems of major seventeenth-century women poets Aemelia Lanyer and Mary Wroth, in pointed relation to the vexed gardens of Edmund Spenser's late sixteenth-century Faerie Queene, and all in the context of crucial contemporary changes in landscape and property law. The author's attention swoops in scale from the altered landscape of an English countryside increasingly owned, enclosed, and exploited for commercial gain during the first generations of the wool trade (the same generations [End Page 331] that saw the increasing "enclosure" of women of the gentry and the bourgeoisie), to the sample "bands" of embroidery patterns, copied from male-authored collections but elaborated on by their female producers. Similar patterns tie together the formal layout of the garden beds and walks of rich lords and gentlemen who owned them with patterns stitched on canvas by their wives to decorate the cloths of indoor domestic space. As gardening was transformed over the sixteenth century from its "huswifly" origins in kitchen and herb gardens to the production of elaborate outdoor décor that displayed its male owner's wealth and power over unimproved (and feminized) "Nature," the gendering and social stratification of the space of the garden was brought into line with the decreasing power of women to control the spaces once so important to their domestic obligations and their specialized knowledge of edible and medicinal plants. After a chapter on this depressing narrative, Munroe turns her attention to contextualizing Spenser's famous Garden of Bliss and Garden of Adonis (among others) with respect to his role in the colonial appropriation and "taming" of Irish land in Muenster, taking cues from Andrew Murphy's reorientation of English literary production away from...