JENNIFER MUNROE, Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature

Abstract

ACCORDING to the accompanying dust jacket, Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature attempts to ‘consider not only published literary representations of gardens, but also actual garden landscapes and unpublished evidence of everyday practice’. As such, it is focused on developing larger theories regarding the space of the garden of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and how it may elucidate our understanding of contemporary socio-political engagements, in particular between the genders. ‘[E]arly modern gardens,’ writes the author Jennifer Munroe, ‘both actual and imagined, provide a window into how early modern space … was shaped and reshaped by people as they made and remade the places they inhabited’ (1). The underlying assumption is evident—the garden, both real and imaginary, is a manifestation not only of those who tend it, but also their ideas about possession, place, and even identity. This assumption leads Munroe to consider the role of the garden in a number of spheres of social relation. After an introduction wittily titled ‘Laying the Groundwork’, Munroe distinguishes her study from previous examinations of Renaissance gardens and gardening practices such as Andrew MacRae’s God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrairian England, 1500–1660 (1996) and Rebecca Bushnell’s Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens (2003). ‘Gender and the Garden,’ writes the author, ‘focuses on how the developing discourse both McRae and Bushnell examine was specifically gendered’ (13). Turning away from the overtly Marxist interpretations of its forebears, this volume founds itself upon a feminist approach, emphasizing horticulture’s role in relations between the genders. However, as with McRae and Bushnell, Munroe is also concerned more broadly with the function of horticultural practice in the establishment and exercise of social power. Thus, Munroe writes ‘[t]hroughout this book, I emphasize how women, like men, made gardens, and in doing so, they were also co-producers of early modern social space’ (14).