Mary Baine Campbell

Major differences between the Latin volumes available to buyers in Catholic countries and the German volumes read in the Holy Roman Empire and in Scandinavia show conclusively that these cautious business-people were well aware of the doctrinal sensitivities of Catholic readers (and book-buyers - the series preceded the institution of public libraries), and edited the Latin editions accordingly. [...]readers from Seville to Lithuania, regardless of their religious persuasion, acquired volumes of the firm's 'magnum opus' in the first half of the seventeenth century'' (384). Van Groesen's analysis of representations of flora, fauna, and human bodies and customs, especially in the long-lived engravings, leaves little doubt that the firm's strong and influential editorial bias was not Protestant, or Calvinist, but European: a Europeanness defined against those global others who could thus, and fatally, grant the traumatically divided Continent a united cultural identity.

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.