Early Modern Cultural Studies Research Articles

"Original Practices," Lost Plays, and Historical Imagination: Staging "The Tragedy of Merry"

"Original Practices," Lost Plays, and Historical Imagination:Staging "The Tragedy of Merry" Emma Whipday and Freyja Cox Jensen In 1594, Thomas Merry murdered his neighbor, Master Beech, by hitting him repeatedly over the head with a hammer. Merry was condemned and hanged, along with his sister, Rachel, who was found to be complicit in the crime. The murder was reported in a news pamphlet—"a booke entytuled A True Discourse of a Most Cruell and Barbarous Murther Comitted by one Thomas Merrey" (August 29, 1594)—and in five broadside ballads published in August and September that year (Knutson and McInnis, "Thomas Merry (Beech's Tragedy)"). In 1600, William Haughton and John Day's "The Tragedy of Merry" (also called "Beech's Tragedy") was performed at the Rose, as documented in Philip Henslowe's Diary (Greg 1: 114). The fictionalized version of the crime played in the same South-wark neighborhood where the murder originally took place. Despite the evident hold of the murder upon the popular imagination, demonstrated both by the proliferation of ballads and pamphlets capitalizing on "news" of the murder and by the staging of Beech's death six years after the murder itself took place, the contemporary narratives of the murder are lost. None of the texts is extant: we find only their traces in records in the Stationers' Register, and in a series of entries in Henslowe's Diary. Yet one portrayal of the crime survives. In 1601, the play Two Lamentable Tragedies was published in quarto, attributed to Robert Yarrington (who appears to have been a scribe) (Hanabusa xv–xvi; Greg 2: 208–209). [End Page 289] The title page describes these two tragedies: The one, of the murther of Maister Beech a Chaundler in Thames-streete, and his boye, done by Thomas Merry. The other of a young childe murthered in a Wood by two Ruffins, with the consent of his Uncle (Yarrington). Two Lamentable Tragedies is unusual in representing two interlocking narratives: one set in Padua in the non-specific past, concerning the murder of a ward by his uncle, and the other, a "true crime," set in contemporary London—the tragedy of Thomas Merry. The two narratives are framed and interlinked by narrator-figures: Homicide, Avarice, and Truth. The relationship between the play performed at the Rose and the surviving playtext has been much debated (Hanabusa xxv–xxviii; Wiggins 305), but whether Yarrington's "Merry" narrative is some form of memorial reconstruction of Henslowe's play, or a separate play altogether, it would seem that both are based on Merry's crime. Indeed, it may be useful to borrow Barbara Hodgdon's term for the relationship between Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and the anonymous The Taming of a Shrew, as "representing different stages of an ongoing theatrical 'commodity,'" of which the exact relationship, chronology, and authorship is impossible to determine (Hodgdon 36). As a later stage of the ongoing theatrical "commodity" of Merry's crime, Two Lamentable Tragedies seems to contain extensive traces of an earlier lost play, yet has itself neither a stage history, nor a recorded relationship with a known author, company, or space. Indeed, it has been suggested that it was never staged, or is even unstageable (Hanabusa xii–xiii). Two Lamentable Tragedies therefore presents unique opportunities for scholars interested in marginal genres, the possibilities for engaging with "lost" plays, and the role of performance practice as—and as a complement to—research, in the study of early modern drama, culture, and society. This article charts our explorations of these possibilities, a process that shared many of the concerns of Oliver Jones's work in Stratford discussed elsewhere in this special issue, but from a different perspective: Jones seeks to explore and reimagine a space, we, a text. We excerpted "The Tragedy of Merry" from the surviving text of Two Lamentable Tragedies, and, working with a company of professional actors and academics, staged our historical imagining of the play at University College London in March 2014.1 A second production, using a new cast of amateur actors with almost no prior experience of early modern drama, was staged at The Walronds in Cullompton, Devon, in...

Milton Now: Alternative Approaches and Contexts. Edited by Catharine Gray and Erin Murphy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pp. ix+284.

<i>Milton Now: Alternative Approaches and Contexts</i>. Edited by Catharine Gray and Erin Murphy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pp. ix+284.

Introduction

Introduction Daniel Vitkus This issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies is an unusual and exciting one in that it offers more than our usual variety of scholarship. This issue’s diversity reflects the openness of this journal to various modes of intellectual work, discussion, and exchange. We continue to publish primary texts and a wide range of interdisciplinary work on various language fields, historical periods, and genres. We welcome future proposals for hybridized forms of knowledge production in the cultural studies vein, including interviews, translations, forums, and review essays. At the same time, we will continue to publish innovative work in the form of articles, as long as those articles contribute to the intellectual mission of this journal and to early modern cultural studies. In this issue, we are delighted to offer to our readers the original- spelling text of a fascinating poem that has never before been edited or made available in print or online. It is a poem by the pirate Sir Frances Verney that was presented in manuscript to Robert Cecil, Secretary of State to James I, in 1606. Matteo Pangallo has painstakingly prepared this fascinating piece of verse with illuminating glosses and helpful notes. We then have a group of four articles that look at various aspects of seventeenth-century culture in Europe and beyond, from Belgium to Barbados. Collectively, these articles exhibit the interdisciplinarity of this journal, from art history in Frank Palmeri’s “A Profusion of Dead Animals: Autocritique in Seventeenth- Century Flemish Gamepieces”; to the cultural and psychological impact of war in Erin Peters’s “Trauma Narratives of the English Civil War”; to colonialism in Rebekah Mitsein’s “Humanism and the Ingenious Machine: Richard Ligon’s True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados”; and a carefully theorized and historicized look at a literary text in Tessie Prakas’s “‘A World of her own Invention’: The Realm of Fancy in Margaret Cavendish’s The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World.” These are followed by Holly Crocker’s contribution [End Page 1] position paper on “The Problem of the Premodern,” which will be the final word entry (at least in JEMCS) to our forum discussion on the question of the “early modern.” Finally, this issue concludes with two incisive book reviews. We are also very excited about the next two issues of JEMCS, both centered on special themes. The first will be on “Desiring History, Historicizing Desire” (edited by Ari Friedlander, Melissa Sanchez, and Will Stockton), and the second will be an issue on “Cute Shakespeare” (edited by Tommy Anderson and Julia Reinhard Lupton). [End Page 2] Copyright © 2016 JEMCS, Inc.

Renaissance et Masculinity Studies : de l’homme moderne au masculin postmoderne

For a long time, the idea of masculinity was not explored from a theoretical point of view. Now a subfield of Gender and Queer Studies, Masculinity Studies complements Women’s Studies and critically examines the traditionally non-marked gender. Having used a post-structuralist perspective to deconstruct modern masculine identities, we can now come to understand relational structures and the construction of male and female subjectivities during the Renaissance. After briefly summarising the theoretical basis of this approach, this essay will show how Masculinity Studies enriches our study and comprehension of early modern culture and literature, building on three recent articles: Todd Reeser’s Moderating Masculinities (2006), David LaGuardia’s Intertextual Masculinities (2008) and Gary Ferguson‘s Queer (Re) Readings (2008).

The dynamics of gender in early modern France: women writ, women writing

In its six case studies, The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France works out a model for (early modern) gender, which is articulated in the introduction. The book comprises essays on the construction of women: three in texts by male and three by female writers, including Racine, Fenelon, Poulain de la Barre, in the first part; La Guette, La Fayette and Sevigne, in the second. These studies thus also take up different genres: satire, tragedy and treatise; memoir, novella and letter-writing. Since gender is a relational construct, each chapter considers as well specific textual and contextual representations of men. In every instance, Stanton looks for signs of conformity to-and deviations from-normative gender scripts. The Dynamics of Gender adds a new dimension to early modern French literary and cultural studies: it incorporates a dynamic (shifting) theory of gender, and it engages both contemporary critical theory and literary historical readings of primary texts and established concepts in the field. This book emphasizes the central importance of historical context and close reading from a feminist perspective, which it also interrogates as a practice. The Afterword examines some of the meanings of reading-as-a-feminist.

“Cut in more subtle angles”: History, Historicisms, and the Art of Representation

In this essay, Anthony Parr examines Kevin Sharpe’s trilogy on images of rule in the light of the New Historicist “turn” in study of early modern culture. He considers the ways in which these three books take the Revisionist historical project into a postmodern debate about whether the chronicle of the past can be described as anything other than a set of competing narratives or representations, all of which are available to us only as texts or images. He finds Sharpe ultimately committed to a belief in historical evidence that yields a trove of information about all of the reigns examined but also raises questions about the focus on a conception of power and authority vested almost exclusively in the monarch. From the perspective of literary studies, this analysis of Sharpe’s project asks where his study of historical representation might take us and how future work can avoid the intellectual cul-de-sacs of postmodern relativism and purely instrumental readings of literature.

Reformations of the Body: Idolatry, Sacrifice and the Early Modern Theater. By Jennifer Waldron. Early Modern Cultural Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; pp. xi + 296, 11 illustrations. $95 cloth, $90 e-book.

Reformations of the Body: Idolatry, Sacrifice and the Early Modern Theater. By Jennifer Waldron. Early Modern Cultural Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; pp. xi + 296, 11 illustrations. 90 e-book. - Volume 56 Issue 1

“In Everything Illegitimate”: Bastards and the National Family

“In Everything Illegitimate”: Bastards and the National Family

Notes on Contributors

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreMatthew Ancell received his PhD from the University of California, Irvine, and is assistant professor of humanities and comparative literature at Brigham Young University. His interests include baroque literature and art, early modern skepticism, Montaigne, and deconstruction. His publications include articles on Góngora, Velázquez, and Derrida. Currently he is working on a study of art and theology in Calderón.Valerie Billing is a doctoral candidate and provost’s fellow in the English department at the University of California, Davis. She has published on Margaret Cavendish and collaborative authorship in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies and is currently finishing a dissertation titled “Big Women, Small Men: The Erotics of Size in Early Modern Literature and Culture.”Michelle M. Dowd is associate professor of English and women’s and gender studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is the author of Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (2009), which won the Sara A. Whaley Book Award from the National Women’s Studies Association. She is also the coeditor of Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England (2007), Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama (2011), and Early Modern Women on the Fall: An Anthology (2012), and her articles on early modern drama and women’s writing have appeared in journals such as Modern Philology, English Literary Renaissance, and Shakespeare Studies. She is currently completing a book on inheritance on the early modern English stage.Kent R. Lehnhof is associate professor of English at Chapman University, where he teaches courses on early modern literature and culture. His essays have appeared in several edited collections as well as in journals such as ELR, ELH, SEL, Modern Philology, Shakespeare Bulletin, Milton Quarterly, and Milton Studies. At present, he is editing a multiauthor volume on Levinas and Shakespeare and researching twinship in the Renaissance.Amy Rodgers is assistant professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, where she teaches courses in early modern literature and culture, film, and audience and popular culture studies. She has published essays on representations of Shakespeare’s audiences in film and contemporary fiction, early film and serial fiction, and is a codirector of the Shakespeare and Dance project. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 42, Number 1Spring 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/675940 Views: 19 © 2014 Northwestern University. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Introduction: Emotional Histories — Beyond the Personalization of the Past and the Abstraction of Affect Theory

This editor’s introduction to the special issue analyzes some of the historical, semantic and disciplinary differences between the terms “feelings,” “passions,” “emotions,” “sentiments,” and “affects,” and assesses their usefulness in the study of medieval and early modern culture, and within the disciplinary frame of the “history of emotions.” The “affective turn” — both in cultural theory and in the autobiographical impulse in the humanities — is a strong impulse in much modern scholarship but as the essays in this special issue show, the discipline of the history of emotions offers rich and promising insights into the social, political, and cultural frameworks in which medieval and early modern individuals navigated, narrated, and performed emotional and social relationships.

Stephen Deng. Coinage and State Formation in Early Modern English Literature. Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500–1700. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011. Pp. 284. $90.00 (cloth).

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Late Early Modern

The switch in terminology from Renaissance to was plainly a deliberate intervention in the moment of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, which dates from the mid-1980s, and was designed to undermine periodization as well as the hitherto exclusive focus on elite culture and high cultural texts. (Though see Phil Withington, Society in Early Modern England 19-44 for evidence that early modern is of Victorian coinage, and 45-70 for evidence that the phrase had wide currency among economic historians in the first half of the twentieth century.) Furthermore, renaissance, like Restoration or BC/AD, is hardly a neutral term, but presumes some progressive, whiggish awakening from a stupor. You are already taking sides using such terminology, and it is fair to say that still scholars who prefer renaissance tend to be more conservative and those who prefer early modern tend to be more progressive.Institutionally, some of the readers of this journal will remember that when we began organizing the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, this meeting was designed to attract work beyond Europe and North America, and as such renaissance is hopelessly Eurocentric and has little meaning or no meaning for Asia or Africa, no reference outside of a European context. GEMCS was intended from the beginning to be more inclusive chronologically and a conceptual alternative to the American Society for Eighteenth- Century Studies.Conceptually, allows, enables, and encourages a continuity, rather than the absolute breaks that course catalogs, college curriculums, and the Modern Language Association job list categories still impose. These are categories that, despite endless critique, by simple inertia and institutional investment as yet determine training, hiring, and, through the curriculum, teaching. Nonetheless, the switch to clearly encourages a longer view, a greater arch (though not quite like Annales longue duree), whether one stresses continuity or rupture. Versions of the longer arch are nicely exemplified in Raymond Williams's work, Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961). Early also has the advantage of obviating such clumsy terms as the long eighteenth though it invites such equally clumsy substitutes as late modern (a description that, in fact, I prefer to eighteenth century). Wherever one's work is situated in the eighteenth century, as a cultural and historical formation, it has more in common with an agricultural old society (as Harold Perkins has it), a face-to-face society (as Peter Laslett has it), than it does to an urbanized, industrialized, and capitalized nineteenth century. Michael McKeon's Secret History of Domesticity offers a particular rich recent example of such fruits, as a prehistory of domesticity and the novel, reaching further back than any study has before. As such, it is unlike all the histories of the novel spawned by Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel that are predicated on novelty and an absolute break between seventeenth-century romance and eighteenth-century novel. For those of us (here read leftist) still given to the larger view, for whom Williams's dialectic of residual, dominant, and emergent still offers the most flexible, capacious, and efficacious model for understanding cultural change, the larger arch is a precondition of any adequate narrative of change. …

Introduction

Introduction Thomas DiPiero and Devoney Looser This post-1660 issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies includes, as is customary, several fine essays and book reviews. The issue begins with Ellen R. Welch's "Dancing the Nation: Performing France in the Seventeenth-Century Ballets des nations," which considers a court entertainment in which costumed dancers impersonated stereotypical national types. Welch uses this dance as an occasion to investigate how Frenchness is defined in contrast to foreign national types, showing how the ballet sets the stage for subsequent conversations on nations and nationhood. Gunhild Eriksdotter's "Did the Little Ice Age Affect Indoor Climate and Comfort?: Re-theorizing Climate History and Architecture from the Early Modern Period" considers the understudied confluence of climate history and architecture, taking as its starting point the need for significantly longer heating periods in the "Little Ice Age." Architectural changes during significant periods of cold in Northern Europe, from 1550 to 1730, allow us to investigate ways that status was linked to comfort during the early modern period. Eriksdotter shows why we need to integrate climate history as a dynamic variable in the study of historical buildings and remains. "The Hazards of Expurgation: Adapting Measure for Measure to the Bowdler Family Shakespeare," by Adam H. Kitzes, shows us that "bowdlerizing," at least in the case of this particular play, involved a more complicated editing process than scholars have previously understood. Kitzes looks over several editions of Family Shakespeare in order to document the full extent of the changes made by Bowdler and to speculate further on why they were undertaken. The essay argues that, rather than merely censor Shakespeare, Bowdler sought to reconcile a longing for a perceived oral culture of literary social coteries with an acceptance of the plays as carefully edited printed texts. Following these three essays readers will find a special section made up of brief explorations and position papers. With this issue, we introduce a forum [End Page 1] on "What is Early Modern?" which will continue through several upcoming issues of JEMCS. Of course, the Editors of JEMCS are keenly aware of the ways in which the term "Early Modern" is variously perceived and used, not to mention debated and misunderstood. The very way in which we have conceived of our enterprise as a journal has been informed by a sense of the differences between "early" and "late" early modern. Indeed, for more than eight years, we have divided our contents into pre- and post-1660 issues, an editorial decision that itself raises questions about the label "Early Modern" and its utility in demarking periods and dates, not to mention its national associations. To further scrutinize and consider this term, in the past and in the present moment, we asked a number of scholars from different disciplinary perspectives to consider what "Early Modern" means and has meant to the scholarly enterprise. We are proud to introduce the first fruits of those invitations, in the form of four thoughtful essays by top scholars Mitchell Greenberg, Laura Mandell, Andrew McConnell Stott, and James Thompson. We look forward to continuing this conversation with our readers and in future issues of JEMCS. [End Page 2] Copyright © 2013 JEMCS, Inc.

Late Early Moderns or, the Victorians

What are the stakes using as a label for either a historical period or for social conditions subtending a state of mind? Historical usage could land more heavily on difference, while social conditions might look for continuities. In attempting to combine both usages linking the Early Moderns with the Victorians, I am considering the question of the modern through the lens of fashion. When we look at clothed people from other eras, differences are obvious. We can characterize an era by its fashion look. Those fashion differences indicate what it might feel like to move around as recognizably part of that cultural moment. But the look does not tell us what cultural differences inform it. Some argue that very notion of fashion begins with the early moderns. Such a point of origin begins to uncover social conditions.Once upon a time Western history, around the mid-fourteenth century, the concept of fashion shaped a new way of viewing and evaluating human subjects. People's vestments no longer indicated just their rank, which prescribed the color, shape, cut, and cost of what they wore, but rather clothing identified their gender and the extent to which they could be considered up to date, in the know-in other words, modern. Such a grandiose and contestable statement follows Gilles Lipovetsky's often maddening, always challenging, argument that modernity can be understood as a democratizing movement defined by the rule of fashion.1 Calling fashion the empire of the ephemeral, Lipovetsky celebrates the evolution of the modern human subject beginning with a time and a conceptual revolution (he calls it Late Middle Ages) that fits into the rubric of the Early Modern. The fashion change that bears the early modern label signifies enormous cultural upheavals on all levels. Fashion could not exist without technological, psychological, and philosophical conditions that make small but constant changes fashion looks both technologically possible and socially desirable.The advent of fashion depends on a concept of the individual who can differentiate himself or herself from a group while remaining part of it. The individual manifests identity fabric, yet at the same time does not deviate too far from the group, so as not to seem eccentric rather than knowledgeable. Fashion requires a consumer mentality, a system of manufacture and trade that can accommodate frequent change, modes of communication that can broadcast such changes, and a loosening, however slight, of fixed social hierarchies. It usually requires a global rather than a provincial perspective. Fashion thrives an atmosphere that values newness and emerges from recognition of individuals' right to expression. Further, fashion includes the aesthetic as an essential component of self-presentation. Given fashion as a feature, the modern can be considered as a way of being the world, a way that registers enormous changes what passes as reality. In that sense, Early Modern seems useful as a term for a particular moment and does not need tweaking; rather it needs what the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies provides: a venue for its further explorations and diverse definitions. The term itself morphs; working dynamically disciplines, employing varied themes and variations, and undergoing transformations within the label itself.At another moment Western history, the Victorian period, a comparable revolution fashion and culture as a whole changed the way civilization looked. As the Early Modern period, Victorian fashion change signifies class restructuring. People adorned themselves by further narrowing class hierarchies, helped by the sewing machine, a device whereby the respectable classes could copy expensive clothes the privacy of their rooms. In the early nineteenth century, upper-class men replaced leggings with trousers, a garment originating with farmers. Captains of Industry donned the suits of working men. …

Jennifer Feather. Writing Combat and the Self in Early Modern English Literature: The Pen and the Sword. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. xvii + 254 pp. $85. ISBN: 978–0–230–12041–9.

Jennifer Feather. Writing Combat and the Self in Early Modern English Literature: The Pen and the Sword. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. xvii + 254 pp. $85. ISBN: 978–0–230–12041–9. - Volume 65 Issue 3

Bernadette Diane Andrea and Linda MacJannet, eds. Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds. Early Modern Cultural Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. xiii + 272 pp. £55. ISBN: 978–0–230–11542–2.

Bernadette Diane Andrea and Linda MacJannet, eds. Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds. Early Modern Cultural Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. xiii + 272 pp. £55. ISBN: 978–0–230–11542–2. - Volume 65 Issue 2

Reviews: Cultural History, History Meets Fiction, the Masculine Self in Late Medieval England, the Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama: Icon of Opposition, Writing Lives. Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modem England, Women Writers and Public Debate in Seventeenth-Century Britain, Religion, Reform, and Women's Writing in Early Modem England, Work and Play on the Shakespearean Stage,

Reviews: Cultural History, History Meets Fiction, the Masculine Self in Late Medieval England, the Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama: Icon of Opposition, Writing Lives. Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modem England, Women Writers and Public Debate in Seventeenth-Century Britain, Religion, Reform, and Women's Writing in Early Modem England, Work and Play on the Shakespearean Stage,

Michelle Dowd. Women's Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. Early Modern Cultural Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. xv + 254 pp. index. illus. bibl. $90. ISBN: 978–0–230–61345–4.

Michelle Dowd. Women's Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. Early Modern Cultural Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. xv + 254 pp. index. illus. bibl. $90. ISBN: 978–0–230–61345–4.

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

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...

:Remembering the Early Modern Voyage: English Narratives in the Age of European Expansion.(Early Modern Cultural Studies.)

:Remembering the Early Modern Voyage: English Narratives in the Age of European Expansion.<i>(Early Modern Cultural Studies.)</i>