Abstract
Review of Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature, by Jennifer Munroe. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2008.
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.