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What was a "garden" in medieval and early modern British culture and how was it imagined? How did it change as

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The Medieval and Early Modern Garden in Britain: Enclosure and Transformation, C. 1200-1750
 9781351051422, 9781138484740

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
PART I Theorizing the Garden
1 Introduction: The Garden at the Intersection of Pleasure, Contemplation, and Cure
2 Gendered Spaces of Flourishing and the Medieval Hortus Conclusus
PART II The Historical Garden
3 Rills and Romance: Gardens at the Castles of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth and Edward I in Wales
4 A Delite for the Senses: Three Healing Plants in Medieval Gardens, the Lily, the Rose, and the Woodland Strawberry
5 In Dock, Out Nettle: Negotiating Health Risks in the Early Modern Garden
PART III The Imagined Garden
6 “To Play bi an Orchardside”: Orchards as Enclosures of Queer Space in Lanval and Sir Orfeo
7 Dressing the Pleasure Garden: Creation, Recreation, and Varieties of Pleasure in the Two Texts of the Norwich Grocers’ Play
8 Political Gardens in Early Modern English Drama
PART IV Gardens and Transformation
9 Horti Recidivi: The Restoration and Re-Creation of Medieval Gardens in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
10 Report on a Pilot Study of the Garden as a Place of Health and Well-Being
Appendix 1 Questionnaire
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

The Medieval and Early Modern Garden in Britain

What was a “garden” in medieval and early modern British culture, and how was it imagined? How did it change as Europe opened to the wider world from the sixteenth century onward? In a series of fresh approaches to these questions, the contributors offer chapters that identify and discuss newly discovered premodern garden spaces in archaeology and archival sources, recognize a gendered language of the garden in fictional descriptions (“fictional” here being taken to mean any written text, regardless of its purpose), and offer new analysis of the uses to which gardens—real and imagined—might be put. Chapters investigate the definitions, forms, and functions of physical gardens; explore how the material space of the garden was gendered as a secluded space for women and as a place of recreation; examine the centrality of garden imagery in medieval Christian culture; and trace the development of garden motifs in the literary and artistic imagination to convey the sense of enclosure, transformation, and release. The book uniquely underlines the current environmental “turn” in the humanities and increasingly recognizes the value of exploring human interaction with the landscapes of the past as a route to health and well-being in the present. Patricia Skinner holds a Personal Chair in History at Swansea University. Theresa Tyers is Research Fellow at Swansea University.

Routledge Studies in Cultural History

51 The Romantic Idea of the Golden Age in Friedrich Schlegel’s Philosophy of History Asko Nivala 52 Student Revolt, City, and Society in Europe From the Middle Ages to the Present Edited by Pieter Dhondt and Elizabethanne Boran 53 Respectability as Moral Map and Public Discourse in the Nineteenth Century Woodruff D. Smith 54 The British Anti-Psychiatrists From Institutional Psychiatry to the Counter-Culture, 1960–1971 Oisín Wall 55 Cultural Histories of Crime in Denmark, 1500 to 2000 Edited by Tyge Krogh, Louise Nyholm Kallestrup and Claus Bundgård Christensen 56 Fascism and the Masses The Revolt Against the Last Humans, 1848–1945 Ishay Landa 57 The Irish and the Origins of American Popular Culture Christopher Dowd 58 The Medieval and Early Modern Garden in Britain Enclosure and Transformation, c. 1200–1750 Edited by Patricia Skinner and Theresa Tyers For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Cultural-History/book-series/SE0367

The Medieval and Early Modern Garden in Britain Enclosure and Transformation, c. 1200–1750 Edited by Patricia Skinner and Theresa Tyers

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Skinner, Patricia, 1965– editor. Title: The medieval and early modern garden in Britain : enclosure and transformation, c. 1200–1750 / edited by Patricia Skinner and Theresa Tyers. Description: New York : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Routledge studies in cultural history ; 58 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017057709 (print) | LCCN 2017060455 (ebook) | ISBN 9781351051422 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138484740 (hbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781351051422 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Gardens, British—History. Classification: LCC SB457.54 (ebook) | LCC SB457.54 .M43 2018 (print) | DDC 635.0941—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017057709 ISBN: 978-1-138-48474-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-05142-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments

vii viii

PART I

Theorizing the Garden 1 Introduction: The Garden at the Intersection of Pleasure, Contemplation, and Cure

1 3

PATRICIA SKINNER AND THERESA TYERS

2 Gendered Spaces of Flourishing and the Medieval Hortus Conclusus

16

LIZ HERBERT MCAVOY

PART II

The Historical Garden 3 Rills and Romance: Gardens at the Castles of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth and Edward I in Wales

39 41

SPENCER GAVIN SMITH

4 A Delite for the Senses: Three Healing Plants in Medieval Gardens, the Lily, the Rose, and the Woodland Strawberry

56

THERESA TYERS

5 In Dock, Out Nettle: Negotiating Health Risks in the Early Modern Garden EMILY COCK

70

vi

Contents

PART III

The Imagined Garden 6 “To Play bi an Orchardside”: Orchards as Enclosures of Queer Space in Lanval and Sir Orfeo

89 91

AMY LOUISE MORGAN

7 Dressing the Pleasure Garden: Creation, Recreation, and Varieties of Pleasure in the Two Texts of the Norwich Grocers’ Play

102

DAISY BLACK

8 Political Gardens in Early Modern English Drama

123

EOIN PRICE

PART IV

Gardens and Transformation 9 Horti Recidivi: The Restoration and Re-Creation of Medieval Gardens in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

133

135

MANUEL SCHWEMBACHER

10 Report on a Pilot Study of the Garden as a Place of Health and Well-Being

155

SARA JONES

Contributors Index

166 168

Figures

9.1 9.2 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4

Mount Grace Priory Garden Kenilworth Castle Garden Age and Gender Profile of Participants Subjective “Feelings” Tested Comparing Systolic Blood Pressure and Heart Rates Before and After Rest Comparing Feelings of Well-Being Before and After Resting

140 143 157 158 159 160

Acknowledgments

The editors and contributors acknowledge the support of the Leverhulme Trust, whose project funding made the present volume possible.

Part I

Theorizing the Garden

1

Introduction The Garden at the Intersection of Pleasure, Contemplation, and Cure Patricia Skinner and Theresa Tyers

This book presents new work on the formation, purposes, and representations of the garden in Britain between the Norman conquest and early seventeenth century. During the period under review here, the shift from religious to rational, scientific thought represented by the twelfth- and fifteenth-century renaissances, and from Catholic theology to the burgeoning Protestant sensibilities in England, provides a background to perceived changes in the ways that gardens were conceptualized and represented. In crossing what is seen as a boundary in Western historiographical periodization between the medieval and early modern (and encompassing consideration of the effects of the Reformation and the emergence of print culture on how gardens were perceived and presented in texts), the studies here examine gardens and gardening from both historical and literary perspectives. The chronological span of the book is deliberately chosen to examine a time of huge cultural transition and to trace how gardens and gardeners embraced (or not) the novelties of garden imagery and practices. The “botanic” approach to collections, and new gardens such as Oxford, founded in the seventeenth century, reflected masculine ideals of rationality and order, as well as the exploitative contacts with new continents from which to bring specimens (Prest 1981). Unlike other volumes on gardening history and culture, however, this one ends with reflections on the lasting relevance and resonance of medieval and early modern garden spaces to modern socioeconomic health and well-being. It has never been so important to underline the need for humans to reconnect with the land and its natural resources, and gardens are literally the nursery in which that process can take place. Exploring past understandings of this relationship is more complex than simply “learning from the past,” but there is little doubt that medieval and early modern insights into the salutary effects of gardening, and the embeddedness of the language of the garden in Western culture, still have currency today.

Studying Gardens Medieval and early modern gardens in Britain have formed the subject of numerous academic and popular studies, but saw an upsurge of interest in the 1980s, coinciding with the growing interest among landscape

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archaeologists. Allied to this renewed interest in the landscape, with its roots in the environmental movement (Carson 1962), is the recognition that health and well-being are inextricably tied to the societies and infrastructure of the world in which we live. The academic study of the subject was boosted by the foundation of the Journal of Garden History (1981, since 1998 renamed as Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes), and the publication of a study of English gardens by Teresa McLean (1981), which at the time could plausibly claim that there were “virtually no books about medieval gardens” but remains in print and is frequently cited by subsequent studies. McLean was not entirely correct: in the same year as her study was published, architectural historian John Harvey brought out his influential Medieval Gardens (Harvey 1981), which, like McLean’s volume, remains in print and which ranged more widely over a longer time frame. Prior to these two studies, however, interest in garden history in Britain was stimulated and sustained by the Garden History Society (now The Gardens Trust), founded in 1966 and publishing its own journal from 1973 onward. Just two years before the appearance of McLean’s book, the Victoria and Albert Museum had hosted an exhibition titled “The Garden: a Celebration of One Thousand Years of British Gardening” (Harris 1979), which hints intriguingly—though perhaps somewhat implausibly—at a documented start point of 979. Gardening as a practice, of course, long predated that terminus post quem. In terms of documentation, however, gardens certainly existed “on vellum” in the mid-tenth century, as Maria D’Aronco outlines in her survey of Anglo-Saxon herbals and their precursors (D’Aronco 2008). Looking further afield, a key academic volume was a collection of essays on medieval gardens published in 1986 by the Dumbarton Oaks research center in Washington, D.C., itself the product of a philanthropic vision that saw the establishment in 1963 of a “quiet and enclosed space where students and scholars could flourish surrounded by beautiful gardens.” Incorporating the collection of rare books relating to garden history belonging to the founder, Mildred Wood Bliss, the center and its library have supported and promoted subsequent meetings and publications on an infinite variety of premodern gardens (e.g., MacDougall and Ettinghausen 1976; MacDougall 1986; O’Malley and Wolschke-Bulmahn 1998; Conan 2007). Do gardens in Britain represent a paradigm for scholarship, or is it simply that the evidence for them is better than in other parts of Europe? Scholars of continental history might contest the latter point (Hunt 1999; Cauchies and Guisset 2008; Goodson in press), but there is no doubt that the British situation has benefited from sustained institutional support (from the National Trust; e.g., National Trust 2016) alongside the work of individual scholars. Gardens still occupy a somewhat marginal place as a subject for academic study, because of their inherently interdisciplinary nature: the contributors to this volume come from literary, archaeological, historical, and medical backgrounds, for instance. Since the publication of McLean’s volume, there has, however, been a steady stream of work, accompanied by a significant

Introduction

5

historiographical shift from simply documenting historic gardens, driven largely by the heritage industry in Britain (e.g. Jennings 2004) to exploring how preindustrial cultivators managed their garden spaces and what environmental lessons might be learned from these historical precedents (Williamson 2013). The special relationship between humans and gardens, however, was and is universal (Bushnell 2003). Although the majority of case studies explored in the present volume are from Britain, we include material relating to the European mainland and further afield to support the overarching contention that the act of gardening represents a common enterprise that transcends national boundaries, even if the form and content of gardens—real or imagined—differed with location and language. A turf bench is a turf bench and looks much the same, wherever it is built (Paul 1985).

What is the “Garden”? Defining the garden is—as all the contributors to this volume comment—a fruitless task, for gardens in medieval and early modern Britain occupied all shapes and sizes of spaces and performed multiple functions for their owners and/or those who tilled the actual soil. Thus, “the garden” is used to express an idea or theme but does not imply that the contributors or editors are taking a universalizing view. Indeed, they differ even on whether a garden space was always enclosed or delineated at all—gardens were and still are diverse, complicated spaces rich with interpretative possibilities. They existed to provide a supplement to the food available to households in town and countryside (Dyer 1994, 113–131), to provide curative plants (Dendle and Touwaide 2008), and as places of repose and of display. They might be located within city or castle walls, or adjoin houses of all sizes, or blend into a semirural landscape where garden became orchard and then pasture, or arable fields, or hunting park (Richardson 2012). The special proximity of garden to house has seen it incorporated into broader considerations of architectural space (Hunt 2004). A garden might try very hard to re-create a semblance of “nature,” to provide a green space to which to withdraw in a castle, or it might be a strictly formalized area where human intervention was meant to be seen and admired. Common to all of them was that they represented the execution of a “design”—however well or poorly articulated on the previous landscape (Everson 2003). Or they might not exist on the ground at all but remain a figment of the literary imagination. The spectrum of possibilities is on view in the chapters, each of which seeks to situate its “garden/s” in the discursive practices of the day. The contributors to the volume each in their own way challenge the division between “functional” gardens as growing spaces for food and medical plants and “pleasure” gardens created (physically or by the pen) solely for the delight of those using them. Kitchen gardens and those in urban spaces, used to supply basic foodstuffs, ostensibly differed markedly from pleasure

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gardens laid out primarily for their aesthetic and recreational qualities, but these functions are not entirely separate and might vary over time (Stark 2014). Just as much pleasure might be had from well-tended vegetable plots as from the strangely grafted novelties proposed, for instance, by the fifteenth-century botanist Nicholas Bollard (Braekman 1985). Pleasure, as the chapters that follow illustrate, was an integral part of all gardening, whether sensory, imaginary, or for the reward of crops, and there is evidence of the urge to try new varieties and techniques throughout our period (Bond 2016). The directness of relationship between people and land, and the proximity of most gardens to places of residence, made gardens a uniquely intimate space, regardless of their size or purpose. Gardens have always functioned at the heart of human well-being, symbolizing fertility and renewal, but have also embodied an inherent ambition to enclose and control nature and to delineate between the countryside (which may still have been subject to agricultural management) and more intimate, personal spaces that might have multiple functions (productive, protective, and/or recreational). The garden has also been recognizably associated with the female body, from the biblical Song of Solomon’s “spouse” being a “garden enclosed” to images of the rose as an allegory for the Virgin Mary (Mellon 2008, 61). Man’s downfall is inscribed as having happened when a woman—Eve—tasted of the forbidden fruit (only later written up as an apple: Allen 2002, 11–13) in the Garden of Eden, itself a heterotopic space of pure pleasure (Morgan 2016, 36–43). Humanity’s exile from this space, driven out into the world, triggered an ever more powerful response—an urge to recapture what had been lost in both material and figurative forms (Prest 1981). The association of women with medieval gardens has a longer presence in the historiography (Welch 1913), but contributors to this volume are nevertheless ambivalent as to whether gardens constituted a specifically female space (Augspach 2004) or were more fluid in their gendered configuration. The positioning of gardens, and their encirclement with walls, trellises, and hedges, represents a deliberate act that is evidenced well before the period under review here, but the purpose of such positioning was not always as simple as it might seem. Walls and fences protected and enclosed but could equally be used to imprison and contain. The Edenic story not only made the garden the source of all knowledge but also justified gendered dynamics of power. The image of careful cultivation, favored in political language as a metaphor for good government, could be disrupted by unruly intruders, whether plants, pests (illustrated so beautifully as locusts in the Golden Haggadah, British Library Additional MS 27210, f. 13r, for instance), animals, or people. The earliest Benedictine rule governing monastic Christianity recognized that gardens, while supplying vegetables for the kitchen and/or medical ingredients for the infirmary, might also provide pleasure and recreation in contemplating God’s works, provided they were enclosed and secluded

Introduction

7

from the outside world (St Benedict, Rule, chapter 66). Within the medieval sphere, several monastery gardens have achieved what might be described as “superstar” status in the scholarship without even existing—we think here, for example, of the idealized plan of the monastery of St Gall in modern-day Switzerland, without an illustration of which no study seems to be complete (Horn and Born 1979). This large-scale monastery map, dedicated to the abbot of St Gall but not, apparently, a blueprint for the redevelopment of his house, was produced early in the ninth century and included detailed sketches of the monks’ vegetable garden, laid out with labeled beds and walkways. The plan has served as a source of inspiration for many subsequent heritage reconstructions, although the present-day abbey itself is hemmed in on all sides by later buildings. Later records show that monks continued to engage in this restoration of the soul while carefully adhering to St Benedict’s admonishment. St Bruno, founder of the Carthusian order, wrote enthusiastically about the refreshment that a weaker soul, “exhausted through ascetic discipline,” might gain from the sight of greenery and flowers (quoted in MacDougall 1986, 53). In the Patent Rolls of the reign of Edward III of England, a license was recorded for the prior and convent of the monastery of St Swithun’s, Winchester, to build an arch or latticed gallery (arcum seu cancellum) to extend over the city wall and the highway adjoining, from a place called “Mirabel” within the close (septa) of the monastery to their gardens and walks (viridaria et deambulatoria) without the said wall and highway, whereby they may pass to and from the gardens and walks for recreation unseen as becomes their order. (CPR Edward III, 1334–8, 224) The sensory pleasure to be had from the garden as a visual, olfactory, and auditory space was arguably as important to medieval and early modern people as its end products (Rawcliffe 2008). Gardens could also be apotropaic spaces: besides greenery, all sorts of things were hidden and buried—one might say “planted”—within them, including bodies and precious objects. In a monastic context, the garden or its nearby orchard might also function as a cemetery (e.g., as in the St Gall plan). A twelfth-century plan for the management of water at Christ Church, Canterbury, too, includes a cemetery orchard (reproduced in Landsberg 1996, 35). In London the Jewish cemetery at Cripplegate, which predated the community’s expulsion in 1290, was later documented— perhaps ironically—as “The Jews’ Garden” (Honeybourne 1959–61; Gilchrist and Sloane 2005). Later medieval sources reinforce the impression of gardens as places to lay bodies to rest or hide precious objects. It appears from a grant of 1336, for example, that the Friars Preacher of Leicester combined both garden and cemetery in close juxtaposition or

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even in the same space (CPR Edward III, 1334–8, 278). The year before, a royal inquiry was ordered as to who were the persons who lately dug up by night beneath a pear tree in the garden of Henry, Earl of Lancaster, in the parish of St Clement Danes without the bar of the New Temple London, and carried away a treasure trove, what it was worth and where it now is; and to hear and determine the whole matter. (CPR Edward III, 1334–8, 206) The true treasures of the garden, however, were its plants. As contributors to this volume demonstrate, aside from their medicinal, dietary, and aesthetic value, they were also imbued with a symbolism that was closely interwoven with metaphor and where visual and olfactory senses played a part. The symbolism of plants and flowers, in particular, the lily and the rose, are constant reminders of chastity and Marian devotion throughout later medieval writings and imagery (Larson 2013). However, the longheld kinship between the rose and the Virgin was, in reality, a fluid one, as beauty, perfection, virginity, and the Virgin Mary all came to be associated with the physical rose, and in this way, they became deeply entwined with romantic love and fertility. A profusion of fresh flowers pervaded the margins of manuscripts, artwork, needlework, and carving. Color symbolism, too, was important: Shakespeare’s writings inherited medieval understandings of how colors could convey a range of meaning; the use of green on stage, for example, harked back to its use as worn by Judas in medieval plays (Oki-Siekierczak 2015). While most of the gardens about which there is most information belonged to the elite (Creighton 2009), the practice of gardening also had the potential to blur class boundaries, offering social mobility to those with specific skills or expertise but not for all. Jennifer Munroe (2008, 1) argues that early modern gardens, both actual and imagined, provide a window onto how early modern garden space—and of particular interest here, the gendered power relationships in it—was shaped and re-shaped by people as they made and remade the places they inhabited. As such, this book understands the early modern English garden to be a site where men and women transformed the look of the natural world, but the garden was also a space where they could manipulate their position in society, too. While it is more difficult to find evidence of the “everyday gardener” in premodern Britain, new work is beginning to piece together the histories of these nonelite artisans, utilizing parish records alongside printed treatises and even recreated garden spaces such as those at the Weald and Downland Museum in West Sussex (Willes 2011; Willes 2014).

Introduction

9

Gardens are, by their very malleability, an evanescent testimony to past horticultural practices and often survive only in written texts or as palimpsests of their previous existence. Studies have taken place at specific sites such as Aberglasney (Halfpenny and Blockley 2002), Rimpton or Glastonbury (Hunt and Keil 1959–60), the Inns of Court in London (Goldring 2011), and Wilton in Wiltshire (Whitaker 2014), to name just a sample. Few, if any, medieval gardens are known, and even extant early modern examples are to some extent compromised by changing fashions in maintenance and restoration. Increasingly, we are also beginning to understand that the medieval and early modern garden was not, in any case, a fixed entity. Seasonality and changing fashions for planting both present challenges to deciding just what a historical garden might have “looked like,” a project that is “undone by the fact that plants are living things” (Forbes 2016, 245). Pots and tubs made container gardening, and the rapid setting up and dismantling of small garden spaces, a possibility, just as it does today, and may go some way to explaining why they leave such a faint footprint where they might otherwise be expected to be located. Moreover, some “medieval” gardens were, in fact, confections of early modern tastes (Henderson 2011). Reconstructions, of course, also face the difficulty of identifying precisely the varieties utilized in the historical spaces (Stannard 1983; Larkin 2008). Yet even the nature of reconstruction needs to be examined closely. The Anglo-Saxon herb garden at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, created in 1987, was the result of a close collaboration between Jane Renfrew and Debby Banham, utilizing archaeological seed remains and references in Anglo-Saxon literature, which are documented in the accompanying leaflet (Renfrew and Banham 1987). Botanist Sylvia Landsberg, on the other hand, whose reconstructions have featured in many medieval heritage sites and the creative industries, has commented, I believe in using the past as a source of inspiration . . . I would not design a wholly medieval garden for myself because it would only be in flower for a short season. A lot of the old plants are floppy and need staking and a lot are prone to disease. And a camomile lawn is brown for most of the year. . . . If you insist on the correct plants you omit the terrific wealth of flowers we’ve developed since then. The Elizabethans would cry their eyes out with envy if they could see all the flowers we’ve got. In a private garden you can create the medieval elements and then put in plants that have a longer flowering season. (Landsberg, interviewed in Leapman 1996) Texts advising on the creation and planting of gardens, and iconography depicting their use, are both as idealized as the St Gall plan. Yet it is worth exploring this period of garden history as it was a uniquely transitional era with a growing fashion among the elite to create spaces entirely given over

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to leisure, and this seems to be the type of garden Landsberg is thinking of when she suggests that [t]hose who wish to have a small totally medieval-style garden can adapt ideas from many of the contemporary illustrations (in particular the classic small garden illustrated on p. 16), using the plant list given on p. 79, but I myself would not do this, because of the fleeting and periodic beauty of such gardens. (Landsberg 1996, 131) The upsurge of written materials from the twelfth century onward across Europe reveals the presence of named, mainly male head gardeners (for example, John de Wyndesore, appointed to the office of “gardener of the king’s gardens at Windsor” in 1336, and John de Sanderwyk, yeoman of the chamber, granted the office of gardener (ortolanus) of the palace of Westminster and the Tower of London in 1337, “to hold during good behaviour with such wages as John le Gardener, deceased, had in the office” (CPatR Edward III, 1334–1338, 194 and 472; and see Colvin 1986). Gardens increasingly became a way to demonstrate wealth and power among the elite, even if, as Liddiard and Williamson have argued (2008), they lacked the staged sophistication of later gardening projects. Manuals to assist the gardener and landowner proliferated from the twelfth century onward, drawing on late antique authors such as Palladius, and were circulated both in manuscript copies and a profusion of print editions. The heterotopic nature of gardens, functioning as many different “spaces” for different people across time, while remaining in a static location, meant that they were also rich in possibilities for metaphorical use in creative literary texts and religious tracts (Winston-Allen 1998; Shami 2008). Given their spatial location, they were, in essence, a liminal place between different worlds. This quality lent itself to imaginary works that highlighted potential dangers both within and outside the garden space (Leslie 2013; Schwembacher 2014). Whereas in historical gardens this might have been limited to being stung or pricked by insects and plants, in foundational myths and stories the garden became a place of love, enchantment, and sexual threat (Grebe 2007). Enclosed they may have been, but highly permeable too.

The Studies The themes outlined earlier are explored in greater depth by the contributors to this volume. Liz Herbert McAvoy examines at length the power dynamics of gardens as “speech acts” and the ways in which the biblical dynamics of the Garden of Eden as a starting point for masculinist discourses of power and authority are destabilized by the writings of female religious of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. To reach this conclusion she provides

Introduction

11

a history of the image of the hortus conclusus or enclosed garden, tracing it from the ancient Near East through to the northern European contexts that are the focus of the volume. Moving from theory to physical entities, Spencer Gavin Smith surveys recent archaeological work relating to garden spaces at several Welsh castle sites. He calls for a greater consideration of their social history and use as elite leisure spaces, rich in potential for further environmental research, that will round out and potentially challenge the dominant historiographical narrative of Welsh castles as primarily military installations. Theresa Tyers zooms in even further, with a discussion of how plants could fulfill multiple purposes in the medieval garden, which included roses, lilies, and strawberries (all eminently cultivable in pots, of course). She examines vernacular medical texts from England and northern France to gain an insight into the uses to which such plants were put. Rounding off the survey of historical gardens is Emily Cock’s chapter on early modern garden manuals, which both harked back to the prelapsarian past while providing practical advice. Her focus, however, is on the dangers in the early modern garden space, ranging from invasive pests to ensuring safe working practices and the best tools for the job. Danger, too, lurks in some of the gardens visible in imaginary texts of the medieval and early modern era. Amy Louise Morgan’s chapter moves from the garden proper to the nearby orchard, and demonstrates how vernacular lais written two centuries apart in northern France and Brittany draw on the queer possibilities of a liminal space, which, as we have already seen, represented a place to bury the dead. Here, the instability and flux that characterized the garden are put to use in undermining traditional gender roles and allowing the supernatural to invade. The Garden of Eden as a space of transgressive acts is revisited by Daisy Black in her consideration of the divergent texts and staging of the Norwich Grocers’ Play, although surprisingly it is Adam who is presented as at fault for taking a break in the beautiful surroundings and leaving Eve, unsupervised, to fall prey to the serpent. Against “a cultural backdrop showing mistrust of sensory engagement, and which was increasingly figuring religious pageants as the decaying curiosities of the past,” the performances of the play nevertheless offered audiences both spiritual instruction and a sensory engagement that extended beyond the visual spectacle to the aromas of the garden. Eoin Price’s chapter demonstrates that scarcely veiled analogies of the dangers that society faced were also referenced in early modern dramatic works, where the garden might represent a “safe”—yet subversively queer—space to withdraw from the political world and where fictional gardeners could be used as a mouthpiece to explore class dynamics and comment on the political landscape. The final section of the book creates a bridge across time from the premodern to the contemporary, questioning how medieval and early modern gardens can and do maintain a hold over the modern imagination. Manuel Schwembacher offers a series of frames within which to understand modern “reconstructions” of medieval spaces, exploring the motivations and contexts within which they

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occur. It is striking, however, that modern reconstructions and reimaginings of historical gardens (sometimes) seem to overlook the possibility of the beneficial effects of the garden environment except in the most prosaic terms of growing medicinal herbs. The therapeutic potential of gardens is transhistorical—it was recognized in historical contexts (and certainly in the period under review here) as it is now (Gerlach-Spriggs, Kaufman and Warner 1998; Hickman 2013). Understanding that “being-in-the-world” is tied to social process and along with changes in perception, more recent developments see people and culture at the center of worldly engagements (Bruno and Thomas 2008, 36). Contrary to the Enlightenment view that nature was to be tamed, ordered, and (ab)used, the new focus is on how we inhabit our natural environment and the health benefits to be gained from spending time in it. We end therefore with Sara Jones’s pilot study of the positive effect (both mentally and physically) of rest in green space, preparatory to our own planned reconstruction of a medieval garden in which the salutary and sensory functions will take pride of place.

Bibliography Allen, Stewart Lee, 2002. In the Devil’s Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food. New York: Ballantine. Augspach, Elizabeth A., 2004. Hortus Inversus: Domineering Ladies and Their Medieval Gardens. New York: New York University Press. Bond, James, 2016. “Continental Plant Introductions to Medieval Monastic Gardens in Britain.” In Agrarian Technology in the Medieval Landscape, edited by J. Klapste, 89–106. Turnhout: Brepols. Braekman, W. L., 1985. “Bollard’s Middle English Book of Planting and Grafting and Its Background.” Studia Neophilologica 57: 19–39. Bruno, David, and Julian Thomas, eds., 2008. Handbook of Landscape Archaeology. London and New York: Routledge. Buell, Laurence, 1996. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bushnell, Rebecca W., 2003. Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward III, 1334–1338. London: HMSO. Carson, Rachel, 1962. Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Cauchies, Jean-Marie, and Jacqueline Guisset, eds., 2008. Le Château: autour et alentours (XIVe-XVIe siècles). Turnhout: Brepols. Colvin, Howard Montagu, 1986. “Royal Gardens in Medieval England.” In Medieval Gardens, edited by Elisabeth MacDougall, 7–21. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, reprinted in Colvin, Essays in English Architectural History, 1–12. Conan, Michel, ed., 2007. Sacred Gardens and Landscapes: Ritual and Agency. Washington: Dumbarton Oaks. Creighton, Oliver Hamilton, 2009. Designs Upon the Land: Elite Landscapes of the Middle Ages. Woodbridge: Boydell. D’Aronco, Maria, 2008. “Gardens on Vellum: Plants and Herbs in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts.” In Health and Healing from the Medieval Garden, edited by Peter Dendle and Alain Touwaide, 101–126. Woodbridge: Boydell. Dendle, Peter, and Alain Touwaide, eds., 2008. Health and Healing from the Medieval Garden. Woodbridge: Boydell.

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Dyer, Christopher, C., 1994. Everyday Life in Medieval England. London and New York: Hambledon. Everson, P., 2003. “Medieval Gardens and Designed Landscapes.” In The Lie of the Land: Aspects of the Archaeology and History of the Designed Landscape in the South West of England, edited by R. Wilson-North, 24–33. Exeter: The Mint Press. Forbes, Stephen J., 2016. “Collections and Knowledge: Constancy and Flux in a Sixteenth-Century Botanic Garden.” Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 36.4: 245–260. Gerlach-Spriggs, Nancy, Richard Enoch Kaufman, and Sam Bass Warner, Jr., 1998. Restorative Gardens: The Healing Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gilchrist, Roberta, and Barney Sloane, 2005. Requiem: The Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain. London: Museum of London. With associated searchable database. http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/cemeteries_ahrb_2005/ Goldring, Elizabeth, 2011. “The Art, Architecture, and Gardens of the Early Modern Inns of Court.” In The Intellectual and Cultural World of the Early Modern Inns of Court, edited by J. Archer, E. Goldring, and S. Knight, 127–137. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Goodson, Caroline, in press. “Garden Cities in Medieval Italy.” In Italy and Medieval Europe: Essays for Chris Wickham, edited by Ross Balzaretti, Julia Barrow, and Patricia Skinner. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grebe, Anja, 2007. “In the Paradise of Love: Medieval Love Gardens: Topography and Iconography.” In Fauna and Flora in the Middle Ages, edited by Sieglinde Hartmann, 225–248. Beihefte zur Mediaevistik, 8. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Halfpenny, Ian and Kevin Blockley, 2002. Aberglasney House and Gardens: Archaeology, History and Architecture. Oxford: British Archaeology Reports. Harris, John, 1979. The Garden: A Celebration of One Thousand Years of British Gardening. London: Victoria and Albert Museum. Hartmann, Sieglinde, ed., 2007. Fauna and Flora in the Middle Ages. Beihefte zur Mediaevistik, 8. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Harvey, John, 1981. Mediaeval Gardens. London: Batsford. Helmstaedter, Gerhard K., 2007. “Artemisia: An Example for Pharmaco-Botanical History in Medieval Treatises on Plants.” In Fauna and Flora in the Middle Ages, edited by Sieglinde Hartmann, 195–208. Beihefte zur Mediaevistik, 8. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Henderson, P., 2011. “Clinging to the Past: Medievalism in the English Renaissance Garden.” Renaissance Studies: Journal of the Society for Renaissance Studies 25.1: 42–69. Hennebo, Dieter, 1987. Gärten des Mittelalters. Munich: Artemis. Hickman, Clare, 2013. Therapeutic Landscapes: A History of English Hospital Gardens since 1800. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Honeybourne, M. B., 1959–61. “The Pre-Expulsion Cemetery of the Jews in London.” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 20: 145–159. Horn, Walter, and Ernest Born, 1979. The Plan of St Gall: A Study of the Architecture and Economy of, and Life in, a Paradigmatic Carolingian Monastery. 3 vols. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Hunt, John Dixon, 1999. “The Garden in the City of Venice: Epitome of State and Site.” Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 19: 46–61. Hunt, John Dixon, 2004. The Afterlife of Gardens. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hunt, Terence J., and Ian Keil, 1959–60. “Two Medieval Gardens: A ThirteenthCentury Garden at Rimpton and the Garden at Glastonbury Abbey: 1333–4.” Somerset Archaeology and Natural History Proceedings 104: 91–101. Jennings, Anne, 2004. Medieval Gardens. London: English Heritage.

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Kühn, Marlu, 2007. “Archaeological Evidence for the Use of Plants in the Medieval German Empire in Special Consideration of Gardens and the Possibilities of Their Exploitation.” In Fauna and Flora in the Middle Ages, edited by Sieglinde Hartmann, 171–194. Beihefte zur Mediaevistik, 8. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Landsberg, Sylvia, 1996. The Medieval Garden. London: British Museum Press. Larkin, Deirdre, 2008. “Hortus Redivivus: The Medieval Garden Recreated.” In Health and Healing from the Medieval Garden, edited by Peter Dendle and Alain Touwaide, 228–242. Woodbridge: Boydell. Larson, Victoria, 2013. “A Rose Blooms in the Winter: The Tradition of the Hortus Conclusus and Its Significance as a Devotional Emblem.” Dialog 52.4: 303–312. Leapman, Michael, 1996. “Gardening: Within a Secluded Arbour.” The Independent, 25 February. www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/gardeningwithin-a-secluded-arbour-1321078.html [Accessed 1 June 2017]. Leslie, Michael, 2013. A Cultural History of Gardens in the Medieval Age. London: Bloomsbury. Liddiard, Robert, and Tom Williamson, 2008. “There by Design? Some Reflections on Medieval Elite Landscapes.” Archaeological Journal 165.1: 520–535. MacDougall, Elisabeth B., ed., 1986. Medieval Gardens. Washington: Dumbarton Oaks. MacDougall, Elisabeth B., and Richard Ettinghausen, eds., 1976. The Islamic Garden. Washington: Dumbarton Oaks. McLean, Theresa, 1981. Medieval English Gardens. London: Collins. Mellon, Joelle, 2008. The Virgin Mary in the Perceptions of Women: Mother, Protector and Queen since the Middle Ages. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co. Morgan, Luke, 2016. The Monster in the Garden: The Grotesque and the Gigantic in Renaissance Landscape Design. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Munroe, Jennifer, 2008. Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. National Trust, 2016. Research Strategy 2017–2021. Swindon: National Trust. www.nationaltrust.org.uk/documents/national-trust-research-strategy.pdf Oki-Siekierczak, Ayami, 2015. “‘How Green!’: The Meanings of Green in Early Modern England and in The Tempest.” E-Rea: Revue électronique d’études sur le monde anglophone 12.2. https://erea.revues.org/4465 [Accessed 1 June 2017]. O’Malley, Therese, and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, eds., 1998. John Evelyn’s Elysium Britannicum and European Gardening. Washington: Dumbarton Oaks. Paul, Martine, 1985. “Turf Seats in French Gardens of the Middle Ages (12th to 16th Centuries).” Journal of Garden History 5.1: 3–14. Prest, John, 1981. The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-Creation of Paradise. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Rawcliffe, Carole, 2008. “Delectable Sightes and Fragrant Smelles: Gardens and Health in Late Medieval and Early Modern England.” Garden History 36: 3–21. Renfrew, Jane, and Debby Banham, 1987. The Anglo-Saxon Herb Garden: A Unique Collection of Herbs. www.lucy-cav.cam.ac.uk/assets/images/LCC_Herb_ Garden_DL_Leaflet.pdf [Accessed 25 May 2017]. Richardson, Amanda, 2012. “‘Riding Like Alexander, Hunting Like Diana’: Gendered Aspects of the Medieval Hunt and Its Landscape Settings in England and France.” Gender and History 24: 253–270. Ruggles, D. Fairchild, 2008. Islamic Gardens and Landscapes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Schulze-Belli, Paola, 2007. “From the Garden of Eden to the locus amoenus of Medieval Visionaries.” In Fauna and Flora in the Middle Ages, edited by Sieglinde Hartmann, 209–224. Beihefte zur Mediaevistik, 8. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

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Schwembacher, Manuel, 2014. “Laughter and Joy Behind High Walls: Curiosities and Ludicrous Scenes in Medieval Gardens.” FS Ulrich Müller 1: 159–171. Shami, Jeanne, ed., 2008. Renaissance Tropologies: The Cultural Imagination of Early Modern England. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Staley, Lynn, 2012. The Island Garden: England’s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Stannard, Jerry, 1983. “Medieval Gardens and Their Plants.” In Gardens of the Middle Ages, edited by Marilyn Stokstad and Jerry Stannard, 36–70. Lawrence: Spencer Museum of Art. Stark, Barbara L., 2014. “Urban Gardens and Parks in Pre-Modern States and Empires.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 24.1: 87–115. Stokstad, Marilyn, and Jerry Stannard, 1983. Gardens of the Middle Ages. Lawrence, KS: Spencer Museum of Art. Welch, Alice Kemp, 1913. Of Six Medieval Women: To Which Is Added a Note on Medieval Gardens. London: Macmillan. Whitaker, Jane, 2014. “An Old Arcadia: The Gardens of William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke, at Wilton, Wiltshire [William Herbert 1501–1570].” Garden History 42.2: 141–156. Willes, Margaret, 2011. The Making of the English Gardener: Plants Books and Inspiration 1560–1660. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Willes, Margaret, 2014. The Gardens of the British Working Class. Newhaven Conn. and London: Yale University Press. Williamson, Tom, 2013. Environment, Society and Landscape in Early Medieval England: Time and Topography. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Winston-Allen, Anne, 1998. “Gardens of Heavenly and Earthly Delight: Medieval Gardens of the Imagination.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 99: 83–92.

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Gendered Spaces of Flourishing and the Medieval Hortus Conclusus Liz Herbert McAvoy

One cannot fully understand the idea of the garden without knowing something about the process that created it. Also in the act of gardening resides both ideology and a desire to create physical order. The garden exists not only as an idea or a place or an action but as a complex ecology of spatial reality, cognitive process, and real work. (Francis and Hester 1990, 8)

In their discussion of the meaning of gardens within those human cultures that build and maintain them, Mark Francis and Randolph T. Hester Jr. (1990, 8–19) posit both their paradoxes and their multivalencies, pointing also to the ways in which the apparently ordered and controlled material space of the garden is disrupted by the overlaying of other complex meanings combining concepts of place, action, and ideas. For these authors, the garden is not only a place of hope, aspiration, and uncertainty but also the place within which the hard work of its gardener will bring about an alltoo-temporary illusion of order, reconciliation, and fixedness that, in truth, is always already fleeting, fading, and dying. Within this configuration, the garden is an unstable and slippery space where power dynamics are clearly operative—whether those dynamics be in the gardener’s perennial attempts to “tame” the unruly and unpredictable environment or whether the garden’s plants themselves are locked in a battle for survival against the elements—and with each other. It is little wonder, then, that gardens loom large within the origin myths of many cultures (and those writings drawing on them) or that those originary gardens are subject to enclosure to counter the fact that there are themselves beset by instability, impermanency, and disruption. In this chapter, I wish to pursue some of these issues by examining the ways in which such power dynamics play out in medieval representations of the hortus conclusus or walled garden, particularly in the gendered contexts of those disruptive adoptions and adaptations undertaken by women visionaries of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a time, of course, when that walled garden was making its concerted presence felt in both religious

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and courtly contexts (Larson 2013; and for an overview McLean 1981, 120–171). Using the work of Jacques Derrida, Grace Jantzen and Luce Irigaray, among others, I argue that, in the hands of women visionaries, such as Gertrude of Helfta (d. ca. 1302) and Mechtild of Hackeborn (d. 1298), the hierarchic gender dynamics long associated with the medieval walled garden are frequently destabilized to reveal a narrative that bears beneath the level of its own narration a redemptive femininity based on the garden dynamics of fertility, growth, and flourishing. In fact, as I shall demonstrate, there is no better “digging place” than the fertile writings of the so-called female mystics of the Middle Ages to unearth the undoing of the phallocratic enterprise and witness the growth of a garden-based hermeneutics within which untrammeled flourishing, long associated with female spirituality, takes center stage.

Space, Power, and the Dynamics of the Land The complex and intertwining dynamics of space and power have been effectively pursued by Edward J. Soja in his Postmodern Geographies (1989, 7), where he posits spatiality as “simultaneously . . . a social product (or outcome) and a shaping force (or medium) in social life.” For Soja, moreover, spatiality is something necessarily reified by what he terms the “illusion of opaqueness,” its construction and performativity serving to conceal how “human geographies become filled with politics and ideology” (1989, 7, 6). Echoing here the sentiments of Francis and Hester regarding the power dynamics played out within our gardens, Soja suggests that within human culture space becomes solid, a “thing,” a “place” within which those power plays that underpin all human interaction, are, like the proverbial Emperor’s Clothes, imprinted and written into being, while remaining utterly invisible to the human observer. To draw on the words of MacCannell (1990, 94), “real or absolute power . . . transcends consciousness, refuses to be named ‘power’ or anything else, subsumes cause and effect, and operates without ever revealing itself.” Invisible power sources and their effects, therefore, become naturalized like a garden and are ultimately productive of what we can term “a landscape of the mind” that carries deep within its core what Jacques Derrida (1975, 96 n.33), using a suitably apt metaphor, identifies as the “enormous and old root which must be accounted for.” Here, Derrida’s “old root” refers to the relentless phallogocentrism that has long insisted on the “truth” of traceable origins (of humanity, of discourse, of writing, etc.) constructed and performed via traditional linear narratives of history and philosophy. By “phallogocentric,” Derrida refers to the dependency of language and its authority on the “phallic” model of linear, logical (and ultimately male) directionality to articulate the “truth” of the world and its history. As such, for Derrida and other poststructuralist philosophers, male dominance/domination has long been built into language itself, something that he argues is “neither an accident nor a speculative mistake.” Indeed,

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elsewhere in his attempts at “deracinating” such narratives to uncover their phallogocentric agendas and politicized spaces, Derrida identifies this “enormous and old root” as nothing but “a concealment of the origin” (1977, 93). As if mindful of Derrida’s vegetative trope, MacCannell (1990, 95) asserts about his own task of investigating the power dynamics of spaces within the landscape that there is nowhere better than the garden—and the language used to describe it—for uncovering the same type of inequalities as we find embedded within linguistic power structures and their naturalization. Building on MacCannell’s position, I argue that, in this sense, the garden—and particularly the walled garden as penned by the hands of the medieval woman writer—provides us with an alternative “grammar,” nonlinear and cyclical, that can bring about the deracination of phallogocentric structures and those texts that aim to promote and simultaneously conceal them. As MacCannell adds somewhat wryly to his analysis, “[p]erhaps we have gone so far as to attempt to bury mother nature herself in our gardens” (1990, 96). Thus, in the same ways the medieval walled garden attempts to impose a sense of phallic order on its own fertile landscape, so, too, do the “phallic” structures of language attempt to impose order on the “fertility” of the written text.

The Medieval Garden: Physics and Metaphysics The history of the medieval walled garden has been well documented (de Wit and Aben 1999; Hunt 1996; McLean 1981), although its multiple and multivalent meanings as part of a continually evolving human imaginary less so (but see Francis and Hester 1990; Whiston Spirn 1998; Pogue Harrison 2008). Its origins were seemingly practical, lying in part in those garden spaces devised in areas of the Near and Middle East more than three thousand years ago and constructed to offer release from the relentless heat of the sun, offering, too, places for repose (for a detailed study of the figuration of gardens in a wide range of ancient cultural contexts, see Conan 2007). Egypt, Babylon, Mesopotamia, and Persia all bore witness to walled gardens, which were planted with fruit trees for shade and contained running water and pools where people could sit in a protected environment, take advantage of its coolness, take pleasure in its aesthetics, and interact socially within this relaxed, enclosed setting. Such gardens came to be known, somewhat perfunctorily, by the Persian term pairidaeza, meaning, quite simply, a walled garden, and were frequently characterized by a division into four symmetrical sections by cooling and life-preserving streams running from a central fountain (McLean 1981, 126; de Wit and Aben 1999, 9; Gharipour 2011; Miller 1986). This was a model that, in the Middle Ages, came to represent the Christian earthly paradise of Eden (“And a river went out of the place of pleasure to water paradise, which from hence is divided into four heads” (Genesis, 2:10; and see Delameau 2000; Meussig and Putter

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2007) and that drew also on the garden of the Song of Songs (“My sister, my spouse, is a garden enclosed, a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed up”; Song of Songs 4:12). As Teresa McLean (1981, 16, 126) points out, the link between these gardens and those of biblical tradition, particularly the Garden of Eden and the lovers’ garden of the Song, goes without saying— both in architectural and etymological terms, pairidaeza formed the “root” of the term and the concept of the Christian “paradise.” As we shall see, however, the pairidaeza, in its Western medieval manifestation as the hortus conclusus, also bore the burden of the type of phallocratic search for origins that is of such concern to Derrida and that Soja (1989, 5) identifies ultimately as having cast “deceptive ideological veils” over the past that serve only to reify and obfuscate “cultural and personal disempowerment.” The hortus conclusus arrived in the west via the Byzantine church, finding its ubiquitous expression in the cloister gardens of monastic institutions and built to recapture a vision of Eden in the enclosed monastic precinct (on monastic gardens see McLean 1981, 13–58, especially 23–36 for Benedictine gardens; Meyvaert 1986). Such “paradises,” of course, were multipurposed, offering shade and quiet spaces for contemplation, prayer, and relaxation, as well as providing ideological reconstruction of a pre-Fall Eden as humanity’s “original” home and thus offering hope of a return. The famous—and unique—ninth-century plan of the gardens of the Benedictine monastery of St Gall in Switzerland, for example, laid out an extensive horticultural geography around the central abbey church with a range of different functions. This plan included a designated “physic” garden close to the infirmary, an orchard that doubled as a cemetery, and two semicircular “paradises” at either end of the abbey building, planted with flowers for their symbolic and olfactory associations and offered as a place for prayer en plein air (Horn and Born 1979, vol. 3, 14–15; McLean 1981, 16–18). This is in spite of the fact that St. Benedict (d. 547) in his rule recognized the practical necessities of cultivating a monastic garden for food, medicines, and other necessities, while remaining a little ambivalent about the garden’s potential joys: monks should not only ensure to enclose their gardens within the precinct but should also remember to cast their eyes downward with humility at all times, even when working in that garden, in memory of the fact that they are inherently sinful beings. Benedict suggests the gardens should be enclosed to prevent the monks from having to leave the monastic precincts, something “not at all good for their souls” (vii, Fry 1981, 289) The likelihood is, therefore, that the St Gall plan presents us with a ninthcentury fixed ideal of the monastic garden that was never fully realized (nor meant to be realized), a reductive, and, what Soja would term, “carcereal” representation that necessarily reifies, stagnates, and silences the vibrant, cyclical, dynamic, and articulate process of flourishing that constituted the living medieval garden (1989, 1). As Robert Pogue Harrison (2008, 45) asserts about gardens, “they embody an affirmation, declare their human authorship, invite recognition, and call for a response,” adding, too, “they

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represent speech-acts . . . in the sense of militating against and triumphing over a condition of speechlessness.” Here he is alluding to contemporary gardens constructed by the homeless in New York City, systematically ignored by the “old root” narratives of “meaningful” androcentric history and its power structures, but his appraisal is equally fitting to other groups whose voices have also been long ignored or misheard, as we shall see. McLean (1981, 126) has argued that increased contact with Eastern traditions via the Crusades and developing trade links during the course of the Middle Ages, “freed paradises from monastic enceintes and spread them abroad as the rose-gardens of courtly Christendom.” Thus, the association of the hortus conclusus with the sacred landscape of Christian tradition merged with its more secular uses as love garden, making it an appropriate space for both the courtly lady and the Virgin, as her semidivine Mother, to occupy. Indeed, both the courtly lady and the Virgin came to be closely associated with the enclosed garden’s most significant flower—the rose—sacred in both Muslim and Christian traditions (McLean 1981, 127). Fully exploiting these connections, the highly influential and deeply allegorical poem Le Roman de la Rose [The Romance of the Rose] begun in about 1230 by Guillaume de Lorris and continued and completed by Jean de Meun sometime around 1275, had already had major impact on contemporary conceptions of the hortus conclusus by the end of the thirteenth century (Brownlee and Huot 1991), at exactly the same time as the enclosed women discussed in the following were creating their texts. Within this amalgam of garden images, the figure of the Virgin and those associated with her became absolute fixtures, with the walled garden representing not only a “royal” and “queenly” status but also a redemptive, chaste fertility.

Women and the Biblical Hortus Conclusus The Virgin, of course, was not the only biblical woman closely connected to the medieval walled garden. In fact, we find a whole array of women—all at some point deemed dangerous to the patriarchal order—associated with garden spaces in both the Old and New Testament. Iconographic representations of Bathsheba, wife of Uriah, for example, frequently depicted her as overseen by King David while bathing in her garden, arousing such desire in him that he arranged the death of her husband to facilitate his own marriage to her (2 Samuel 11). Elsewhere, the similarly spoken-for Susanna, wrongly accused of adultery by two lascivious Elders also watching her bathe in her husband’s garden, narrowly escaped a stoning for her presumed guilt (Daniel 13:1–65). Queen Jezebel, too, suffered the fate of being thrown to her death and eaten by dogs for arranging the murder of her neighbor and appropriating his enclosed vineyard for her husband, Achab, by means of a forged letter sent to the elders of the city (3 Kings 21:15–23), and Mary Magdalen, the former prostitute, encountered the risen Christ in the garden of burial near Golgotha, thus generating her redemption as “apostle to the

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apostles” (John 20:17). In biblical terms, therefore, on one hand, women and their gardens frequently provide a lethal combination in terms of destabilizing patriarchal order and (self-)control by means of their deviousness and fleshly sexuality and, on the other, they became a signifier of redemptive possibilities. The hortus conclusus as the Virgin’s “natural” domain thus produced a “safe,” seemingly unproblematic female-focused garden enclosure within which the “old root” of patriarchal supremacy could remain present, although still buried invisibly in the fertile earth beneath her. Indeed, as Rudolph Borchardt (2006, 33) has asserted about the underlying tensions of such patriarchically affirmed representations: The garden stands at precisely the center of this tension and displaces itself . . . toward nature or creativity. This is the deepest reason for which the human being dreams that our origins lie in a garden, and that the garden is the place in which we achieve enlightenment; this is why we hope to find redemption in a garden, and why we look for solace there. The garden of our “origins” par excellence, of course, along with its “dangerous” woman (a combination always already haunting all representations of the medieval hortus conclusus), is the Garden of Eden. Here is the place where Eve the first woman, at least according to the “old root” of phallocratic history making, set a precedent by opening its gates to sin and sexuality. Through Eve, too, humankind was forever exiled from this original garden home, trudging west with Adam to endure a life tilling the soil and suffering the pains of childbirth. This is a scene depicted countless times in medieval iconography to remind the onlookers of human transgression and the loss of paradise—the “motherland”—to which matrixial plenitude the human may never return until the Last Days. As Luce Irigaray (2013, 150) has argued of the patriarchal construction of the brave new world outside Eden, always symptomatic of exile: it is a “world that man has built to supplant his adhesion to the maternal world, to assert himself against the mother, against participation in her world.” In MacCannell’s terms, the maternal, too, is buried in the phallogocentric soil. As I have suggested earlier, one of the most insistent of such “assertions against the mother” in the Middle Ages was the generation of a plethora of imaginary walled garden spaces, along with those women and their ventriloquized stories enclosed within them. And yet the fact of enclosure carried the potential for these transgressive spaces to be articulated via fresh narratives—or even via old narratives reassembled in new ways. Pogue Harrison (2008, 46) clearly concurs with this potential, even within contemporary contexts, in his suggestion that, rather than being the bearers of hegemony, “gardens amount to the beginning of a dialogue, and the interlocutor is whoever takes the time to notice and wonder at them.” Thus, when we take the time to stop, notice and wonder at the medieval hortus conclusus and its

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representations, we too can become party to new dialogues, new meanings beyond the old, phallocratic “root” that has been long buried there. This is evidenced most vividly in a widely embraced apocryphal tradition running alongside the established canonical one that recounted the post-Edenic lives of Adam and Eve in exile. This apocryphon was very well known throughout Europe and the Middle East in a great many different languages and forms and was based on what were known as the “Adambooks.” These were especially popular in western Europe, Britain, and Ireland (Murdoch and Tasioulas 2002, 1–28, here 7). Here we frequently find Eve as the active partner, just as she was in Eden, exercising an agency which runs counter to traditional responses to her so-called transgressions, both inside and outside Eden—and one concertedly meeting with the approval of Pogue Harrison (2008, 1–24) in his own discussions of the raw deal patriarchal narrative has meted out to the “mother of humanity” within western tradition. Examining the evidence of the Genesis narrative as “dialogue” between garden and woman, Pogue Harrison recognizes the ways in which, ultimately, God fell into his own trap by “endowing Eve with the potential for natality.” Indeed, for Pogue Harrison, Eve’s transgression was a maternal act that served to transform the sterile “garden of ennui” into the fecundity of a world of mortality; as he asserts, “[i]f death is the price one pays for fruitfulness, so be it” (Pogue Harrison 2008, 15, 19). For Pogue Harrison, there is much to be learned from what the garden can articulate to whoever chooses to listen with care (in all senses of the word), something that is particularly the case for the garden of the apocryphal corpus, especially within the English tradition. Here, it is Eve, for example, who attempts a return to Eden for the first time with her son, Seth, while Adam lies helpless and dying. Here, too, Eve attempts to obtain a unique elixir from the Tree of Life that alone can save him. For a second time, however, an angel with flaming sword drives her from the gate of paradise, telling her, “‘Þou my3te not haue of þat oyle of mercy til fyue þousinde 3eer, two hundred, and ei3te and twenty be eendid’” (You may not have that oil of mercy until five thousand, two hundred and twenty-eight years have passed; Day 1921, 95). Within phallogocentric terms, it will take another woman—this time a Virgin—to take up occupancy in the garden and redeem Eve’s “transgression” by offering up the “fruit” of her own “garden”/womb—Christ—as the ultimate “oil of mercy” and the crucifix, as new “tree of life,” streams with blood instead of sap. In this way, the hortus conclusus became a complex repository for a wide range of multivalent traditions during the course of the Middle Ages— but always housing a woman somewhere at its core, whether de malo or de bono: in Pogue Harrison’s terms (2008, 43), like many gardens, horti conclusi gathered “the spiritual, mental, and physical energies that their surroundings would otherwise dissipate, disperse, and dissolve.” In other words, the walls of the enclosed garden did far more than merely contain its plants and occupants; rather, it served to collect and collate the stories

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of the past, including the anxieties and aspirations they encompassed, and render them coherent to the present, both in terms of the “old root” and, sometimes, in wholly changed ways, as demonstrated next.

The Hortus Conclusus: Garden of the Gods The association between walled garden and enclosed woman is not restricted to the Christian tradition, however, suggesting that the overt gendering of this type of space and its power dynamics as a mytheme runs far deeper within the human imaginary than considerations of Mary or Eve may suggest (e.g. Viellillard-Baron 2007 and more generally Conan 2007). For example, a mythical garden takes center stage toward the end of the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, a work dating back to the third millennium BCE. In many ways, this myth of origins echoes the post-Edenic trials of Adam and Eve recounted earlier, in its narration of the increasingly urgent quest of its eponymous hero, Gilgamesh, to find the Garden of the Gods and—again—the elixir of eternal life. Abandoning his wife, child, and the world to do so, Gilgamesh during his journey is eventually drawn into a slit in the mountainside which opens into to a seemingly endless tunnel and, eventually, into the Garden of the Gods, all described in terms of a birth-inreverse, a matrixial return from exile: After eleven leagues [in the tunnel] the dawn light appeared. At the end of twelve leagues the sun streamed out. There was the garden of the gods; all round [Gilgamesh] stood bushes bearing gems. Seeing it he went down at once, for there was fruit of carnelian with the vine hanging from it, beautiful to look at; lapis lazuli leaves hung thick with fruit, sweet to see. (Sandars 1960, 96) Gilgamesh is here delivered via rocky birth canal into spectacular garden— the apparently fruitful, womblike space of the Garden of the Gods, studded with flowers, pearls, and precious stones, destined to remain intact and never fade. It is the domain of the M(m)other who is always at home. Moreover, these precious stones appear to have gendered connotations in Mesopotamian contexts. Ulrike Steinert (2012, 8, n. 37) suggests, for example, that within Mesopotamian practices, the carnelian, because of its color, was associated with the menses and used in both magical and mechanical capacities to seal up a woman’s vagina or womb in the case of female flux. It was clearly associated with aspects of female fertility in ancient Mesopotamian cultures, therefore. Nor is this an ordinary paradise garden; it is a sacred vineyard, the realm of the beautiful vine goddess, Siduri, who speaks to Gilgamesh as St Michael does to Eve and Seth in the apocryphon: “Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to? You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man

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they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping” (Sandars 1960, 99). Unlike Eve, whose fruitful potential in Genesis is proscribed and delimited by the Logos, both before and after the Fall, consistently in this episode Siduri is identified as “the wine-maker,” her words a fine vintage to alter the warrior consciousness of her mortal—and thus doomed—interlocutor. For Siduri, the only life of value to be lived in the face of the shadow of death is one that echoes the fruits flourishing in the garden in response to her careful tending: Gilgamesh should return home, enjoy the here and now, cherish his child, and value the love shared with his abandoned wife. This, she suggests, is his legacy, his immortality, the site of his flourishing. Gilgamesh, of course, ignores her advice, ending the epic in tears of despair without wife or child, the only potential for immortality left to him being the writing down of his story on tablets of cold stone to be found generations later by those with no memory of him. How that is read, will be a matter of history—or, perhaps more pertinently, the enormous and old root of phallogocentric historiography. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (2015, 135–136) reminds us, “[s]tone speaks across the centuries whilst its human companions come and go.” No doubt, Eve, too, is aware of this when, in the apocryphal tale, she commands her son Seth to write on tablets of stone her own account of the loss of Eden. Whereas both acts of writing-bodies-intostone are initiated by a woman’s voice, nonetheless, in the hands of male interpreters they become what Pogue Harrison (2008, 10) terms “a form of repatriation.” Within such “repatriation,” the idealized lost garden—the womb—is reconstructed by means of the written word, the Logos, echoing a process that, for Irigaray (2013, 151), is “a web of habits or customs, but . . . not a real nearness.” So are histories and theologies made via habits or customs, with the importance of the hortus conclusus to those histories being summed up neatly by MacCannell (1990, 96, drawing on Derrida’s phallocratic fetish of origins): The reason we must keep others out of our gardens is that there is a body buried next to the ‘enormous old root,’ specifically the remains of . . . a kind of feminine sexuality that might flourish outside of domestic relationships. For MacCannell, then, the place of the garden of origins in the human imaginary, particularly the garden housing a woman at its center, is the place where a once revered and powerful articulation of female sexual agency is buried within a patriarchal culture that has long needed to harness that power for its own heteronormative purposes. In the estimation of Irigaray (2013, 150–151), “the world that man has built to supplant his adhesion to the maternal world . . . , against participation in her world, has become a screen, even a weapon, which intervenes between the masculine subject and himself.” For Irigaray, too, this has led to man’s self-enclosure within

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a redefined “garden” of his own making, so that “[h]e is not only sheltered but also enclosed by his logos, becoming a prisoner of his own productions.”

Flourishing and Necrophilics MacCannell’s and Irigaray’s allying of female sexuality to ancient, largely lost representations of a flourishing garden of origins also echoes the stance of the theologian Grace Jantzen, who, in a detailed examination of the fraught relationship among women, sexuality, and language within Christian tradition, has argued that the once positive associations between these terms have been all but eradicated within theological discourse by the hegemony of male exegetical traditions that have long privileged the male body and the domination of the phallus as its transcendent signifier. For Jantzen (1998), it is these that have become the only producers of meaning within Western cultures. Within such production, the existence of a “reciprocal relationship” between what Jantzen terms the Christian necrophilic imaginary— that is to say a religious ideology shaped by the fetishizing of death—and the dominant male symbolic order has produced the same kind of “illusion of opaqueness” as identified by Soja at the start of this chapter. Like the invisible woman enclosed within the walled garden of popular medieval representation, such opaqueness or fixity within the religious arena has rendered all but invisible and unacknowledged the origins of Christian belief systems, origins that are rooted, again according to Jantzen, not in the violence of a male hero’s self-sacrifice and death but in the flourishing associated with the natal and the maternal that are present in equal measure, albeit buried beneath the surface: the body beside the “old root.” For Jantzen, therefore, a conscious return to an imaginary of flourishing, rather than one of spiritual warfare and masculine heroism, could serve to “open up a space for women subjects and offer striking possibilities for a feminist philosophy of religion” (Jantzen 1998, 157). Nor is this a revisionist stance; Jantzen merely advocates a rereading and reassembling of the evidence to counter what Irigaray (2013, 96) identifies as a concerted forgetting of women and women’s “stories” within monotheistic faith systems and cultures, rendering the woman “an inaccessible thing that it is advisable to renounce.” Indeed, it is just such an act of renunciation that led Gilgamesh to his own downfall, Adam to his, and ultimately to Eve’s condemnation as the harbinger of sin and sexuality. Such renunciation, too, maintains for the male imaginary the phantasm of its own investment in a far-off future (in Adam’s case, specifically 5228 years), rather than the here and now of a flourishing that has ultimately reframed by phallic law as “transgression.” For Pogue Harrison (2008, 15), explicitly examining the Edenic narrative of Genesis in this same context: [Eve’s] transgression . . . was in itself already an act of motherhood, for through it she gave birth to the mortal human self, which realizes itself

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Flourishing as a philosophy, then, endangers the male subject position unless it can be seized and appropriated into a walled-in imaginary “garden” realm, constructed, owned, and controlled to fit the terms of that imaginary, within which the “old root” itself must remain deeply buried so as to be deemed “natural,” invisible. Thus, this “old root” has tended to give shape and “life” to what Irigaray (2013, 88) has identified as “some figure of allegory, more or less divine . . . already no longer at the source of life”—and the walled garden in the Middle Ages becomes this allegory’s familiar domain in the form of the “lady” or the Virgin. As such, within phallogocentric tradition, the hortus conclusus constitutes a double-edged sword in terms of its representation of enclosure—and containment—of the woman within, whatever illusory freedoms she may be granted there.

The Garden, the Text, and the Woman Writer But what happens to the discourse of gardens and flourishing when women make use of it in their own writings? The garden in the hands of a woman writer living amongst other women, some of them writers too, offers significant potential for redefinition and realignment. Until recently, however, this question was rarely addressed, but several decades of work on medieval women’s writing have now led to a far greater understanding of how patriarchal structures may often be significantly destabilized within differently gendered writing contexts (Herbert McAvoy and Watt 2012, 4–8). To address this specific question here, I turn to the writing of Gertrude of Helfta and Mechtild of Hackeborn, both nuns at the Saxon monastery of Helfta during the thirteenth century (for accounts of Gertrude and Mechtild, see Finnegan 1991). In her Legatus Memorialis Abundantiae Divinae Pietatis (Herald of Divine Love), Gertrude recounts the many visionary encounters with Christ she experienced during her adult lifetime. Here, one of her most vivid reveries describes the abundant joy she received while sitting in the enclosed monastic garden one springtime morning at sunrise: die quodam infra Resurrectionem et Ascensionem, cum ante Primam, curiam intrassem, et prope piscinam sedens, intenderem amoenitatem loci illius, qui mihi placebat ex aquae praeterfluentis limpiditate, circumstantium arborum viriditate, circumvolantium avium et specialiter columbarum libertate, sed praecipue ex absconsae sessionis secreta quiete. (II.3, in Paquelin 1875, 62–63) One day between Easter and Ascension I went into the garden before Prime, and, sitting down beside the pond, I began to consider what a

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pleasant place it was. I was charmed by the clear water and flowing streams, the fresh green of the surrounding trees, the birds flying so freely about, especially the doves. But most of all, I loved the quiet, hidden peace of this secluded retreat. (Winkworth 1993, 97) Here, far from the idealized space of the St Gall gardens plan discussed earlier, or even St Benedict’s functional space, this garden at Helfta is full of the renewed vigor and greening of the springtime, with Gertrude seeing it afresh, as if for the first time. Moreover, the fact that this small garden allows her some solitude, some “thinking-time,” generates for her enormous pleasure: its slow invitation for her to “consider” it, and be “charmed” by it, and to “love the quiet, hidden peace” draws her inexorably into a universe of sweet contemplation and visionary transformation—and thus confirming Pogue Harrison’s assertion (2008, 43) that “repose [in the garden] is a kind of orientation.” Rather than have her struggle with “the old and enormous root” of the garden as problematic Edenic space where sins may be unearthed in its pleasures, Gertrude’s solitary communing with the natural world and its cycles of growth allows her to embody the garden herself. Instead of observing it merely as an exemplar or prototype from without, in effect Gertrude becomes her own matrixial paradise shared with God: she writes, for example, how it incentivizes her to “green” herself like the trees in springtime, to grow spiritual wings like the birds in the leafy branches, and soar directly towards God, become the motherlike garden-womb in which he will flourish: Si . . . in modum aborem bonorum operum viriditate florerem; insuper terrena despiciendo coelestia libero volatu in modum columbae appeterem, et cum his sensibus corporalibus a tumultu exteriorum alienata, tota tibi mente vacarem, omni amoenitate praejucunda tibi cor meum praeberet inhabitationem. (II.3, Paquelin 1875, 63)

[I]f like a tree, growing in the exercise of virtue, I were to cover myself with the leaves and blossoms of good works, if, like the doves I were to spurn earth and soar heavenward; and if, with my senses set free from passions and worldly distractions, I were to occupy myself with you alone; then my heart would afford you a dwelling most suitably appointed from which no joys would be lacking. (Winkworth 1993, 97) There is no doubt here, of course, that Gertrude is drawing heavily on both secular and religious images of the lone woman in the hortus conclusus, a literary and iconographic trope that had taken up a position at the forefront

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of the contemporary cultural imaginary by the time she was writing in the late thirteenth century, as we have seen. There is little doubt that Gertrude, who may herself have been born into one of the noble Thuringian families but who entered the monastery as an oblate at the age of five, identified with both these roles in her own physical and literary forays into the hortus conclusus and used them to expound on experiences lying ultimately beyond the bounds of “logical” language. Mechtild’s text, the Liber Spiritualis Gratiae (Paquelin 1875–77; a modern English translation is in preparation by Barbara Newman), later translated into English as The Booke of Gostlye Grace (Halligan 1979), was, along with Gertrude’s, destined to become a medieval “best seller” during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Soon after its inception, it was translated into virtually every European vernacular and recirculated, often alongside Gertrude’s writing, in a number of formats during the two hundred years after her death (Hellgardt 2013; Nemes 2013; Voaden 1996). Additionally, Gertrude appears to have acted as scribe for Mechtild, so it is no surprise that both women draw concertedly on garden hermeneutics as a means of shaping language to adequately express both their individual and their shared visionary insights, suggesting, too, high levels of interaction and collaboration. While, however, Gertrude was happy to celebrate and channel the aesthetics of the “real” garden into such hermeneutics, as demonstrated in the extract discussed earlier, Mechtild was initially a little more ambivalent, on one occasion needing strong endorsement from Christ to assuage her anxiety about her own joyful responses to the beauty of the countryside surrounding Helfta, which she feared might lead her into sin. Here Mechtild recounts how the land’s natural beauty struck her profoundly as she walked out to meet a funeral cortege approaching the monastery. Such is her concern after the event, however, that Christ has to offer her strategies of prayer and contemplation so she might channel such reactions into a visionary understanding of the joys and beauties of heaven (Liber, II.xxii, Paquelin 1875–77, 161–2; Booke, II.xxv, Halligan 1979, 374). Such channeling of the material garden into a visionary understanding of God’s secrets forms an integrated narrative strategy shared by both writers. In particular, both the Legatus and the Liber privilege the color green, which is used repeatedly by their authors when discussing Christ’s appearance, clothing, and actions. In both cases, too, this “greening” of Christ is explicitly—and divinely—associated with the “flourishing” he brings to those who love him most dearly. In Gertrude’s Legatus, for example, Christ’s green tunic provides for her “signum quod florida gratia tua semper viret, nec aliquando arescit in valle humilitatis” (a symbol of your grace which is never dried up but always flourishing and green in the lowly valley of humility; II.xvii, Paquelin 1875, 89; II.16, Winkworth 1993, 118), and in Mechtild’s Liber, Christ explains to her, “per viridem autem viror quo semper floreo in meipso” (the colour green signifies the greenness by which I flourished in my life; I.ix, Paquelin 1875–77, 30; Halligan 1979, 120).

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Likewise, in both texts, Christ’s “natural” milieu is envisioned as a garden, superimposed in visionary fashion on well-trodden areas of the monastery— the choir, the altar, the cell, the dormitory—and, as such, serving to “green” the entire monastic precinct and establish it as doubly sacred space: simultaneously part of this world and the eternal, it constitutes what Michel Foucault (1986, 24) has identified as a “heterotopia,” that is to say a site that has “the curious property of being in relation with all other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect.” As such, the “garden heterotopia” invoked by these women in the monastic space is disruptive in that it superimposes a reclaimed Eden within the nunnery, in Foucault’s terms asserting “a simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space,” and thus disrupting entirely, on Christ’s authority, the hegemonic “old root” readings of Eden, mentioned previously. This is developed further in both texts where their visionary gardens are also frequently associated with a reconfigured crucifixion scene—but one from which the necrophilic horrors of Jantzen’s self-sacrificial “hero” have been removed. Instead, the engine of the cross is replaced by a hedged garden or a leafy tree, both demonstrating a green flourishing with strong overtones of the feminine. For example, on one occasion Gertrude (referring to herself in the third person) tells us, [B]enignus Dominus, compatiens demonstravit illi hortulum valde parvum nimisque angustum, qui diversorum florum vernantia plenus, spinis erat circumseptus, et modicum mellis erat fluens in ipso. (III.iv, Paquelin 1875, 122) T]he merciful Lord showed her a very small and extremely narrow garden, where flowers of various kinds were growing in a profusion. It was surrounded by a hedge of thorns and a feeble trickle of honey was flowing through it. (III.4, Winkworth 1993, 158) The thorn hedge, of course, was a staple component of many horti conclusi during the period and, no doubt, part of the topography of Helfta’s own gardens (for a comparable English example, McLean 1981, 260). But here, when related directly to Christ, it becomes a clear mnemonic for the crucifixion, combining both mechanics and poetics in a single image. Similarly, the allusion to the seeping honey, while summoning up consideration of Christ’s shed blood and the “sweetness” of the Eucharistic wine, nevertheless superimposes upon it far stronger resonances of the biblical Song of Songs (1.1: “Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth: for thy breasts are better than wine”; 4:11: “Thy lips, my spouse, are as a dropping honeycomb, honey and milk are under thy tongue”). The Song, of course, was a book ultimately celebrating a transcendent, rather than sinful female sexuality, and promoting an erotics of flourishing in its lovers’ garden, in spite

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of protracted male exegetical traditions that had separated off its feminine poetics from women themselves in a relentless allegorizing endeavor (Astell 1990; Matter 1990; Engh 2014). Long overwritten within Christian tradition by the inexorable process of male interpretation, the Song became populated with exactly the “some kind of allegory” recognized by Irigaray (and quoted earlier) that, in turn, was created to stand in for women themselves. Thus, the Song’s bride was transformed into Virgin Bride, Chastity, and/or the church, and its bridegroom into the Bridegroom, Christ, constituting another “old and enormous root” that fed voraciously off the female “body” that was “buried” beside it invisibly in the exegetical “soil.” However, although steeped in these male exegetical traditions, the writings of Gertrude and Mechtild exhume such a “burial,” recasting these biblical gardens via a visionary realignment of their intrinsically feminine poetics in the construction of their own authority. Mechtild’s gardens are every bit as multivalent as this one from Gertrude’s text. In one dramatic vision received in the monastic chapel during Mass, for example, Mechtild sees Christ sitting on a flowery mound within a garden, which “circumspectus est arboribus pulcherrimis, plenis fructibus. Sub quibus Sanctorum animae quiescebant, habentes singuli tentoria aerea” (is enclosed by the most beautiful trees, full of fruit. Under these trees were resting the souls of the Saints). Each saint lies beneath a “tentoria aerea” (tent of gold) and eats the fruits “in magno gaudio et delectione” (with enormous joy and delectation; I.x, Paquelin 1875–77, 31; I.22, Halligan 1979, 122). Here, the vision of Christ in the hortus conclusus associates him not with the Bridegroom of the Song but with popular representations of the Virgin who, as mentioned previously, was more often than not depicted iconographically as reading, sewing, or nursing her child in a narrow, enclosed garden. Mechtild, however, leaves no room for misinterpretation of this gender transformation. Indeed, she has Christ himself explain to her readers the meaning of this vision: in this case, the hill represents Christ’s holy conversation; the trees represent charity, mercy, and the other virtues; the fruit-eating saints provide models for those who wish to have “in operibus misericordiae floruerant” (flourished in the works of mercy) by being refreshed “de arbore misericordiae” (by the tree of mercy; I.x, Paquelin 1875–77, 32; I.22, Halligan 1979, 123). Again, crucifixion imagery is invoked, this time by allusion to the “tree of mercy,” which also bears resonances of the locus of original sin—Eden—with its Tree of Knowledge and Tree of Life. Again, however, its usual necrophilics are dispensed with: there is no blood, no suffering, no pain. In an imaginary devoid of the usual crucifixion tortures that have the Christic bloodshed drench the soil of Golgotha beneath the cross, Mechtild’s tree is instead rooted within a field of flowers that, encircled and enclosed, becomes the matrixial hortus conclusus containing Christ the Bride at its center. Fully transformed from conquering, bleeding, beaten hero, within this wholly familiar yet defamiliarized visionary representation, in Mechtild’s hands Christ morphs into a

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vision of the flourishing mother of humanity herself. Indeed, Christ explicitly confirms his motherly status on a number of occasions, again overtly overwriting the standard crucifixion necrophilics as he does so. In book I, for example, in speaking of his crucifixion, he explains: “tamquam filio suo mater illis me obviam dedi, ut eos de faucibus luporum eruerem” (I gave myself as a mother meets her child to save him from the mouth of the wolf; I.xviii, Paquelin 1875–77, 53; I.32, Halligan 1979, 164). As a result of this self-inscription of the feminine, Christ’s self-confessed maternity transforms scourges into kisses, head wounds into coronet of precious stones, and side wound into mother’s breast flowing with “poculum vitae” (the elixir of life; I.xviii, Paquelin 1875–77, 53; I.32, Halligan 1979, 165). Christ may still himself be the Tree of Life, but that tree is definitively feminized, by his own profession. The tree rooted at the center of the hortus conclusus is a visionary image common to both texts; and, in view of Derrida’s conception of the phallogocentrism such rootedness represents, we might expect to find in it more orthodox associations. Mechtild, however, tells of how she receives a vision in the monastic church in which Christ appears to her as an enormous tree spreading its branches across the whole earth. This vision, taking place as it does during the Maundy Thursday Mass, does not herald the desolation of Good Friday, as we might legitimately expect. Instead, it prefigures the joys of the Easter Sunday to come, eliding completely the anticipated necrophilic suffering of the imminent crucifixion in favor of Christ’s arboreal flourishing: Vidit in medio Ecclesiae arborem pulcherrimam proceritate, et latitudine sua totam terram implentem, quae ex tribus frondibus de terra insimul ortis excreverat; et frondes arcuatae et reflexae errant ad terram. (I.xvii, Paquelin 1875–77, 50; I.31, Halligan 1979, 158) She saw in the middle of the church a very beautiful tree, the height and breadth of which filled the earth, from which tree three joined roots grew out of the earth at the same time; and those roots arched and bent back towards the ground. In the branches of the trees birds sing, and beneath the boughs people partake of its fruits. Ultimately, the officiating priest himself becomes treelike, seemingly draped with leaves and bunches of fruit in evidence of how Christ’s grace “fructuosius in ejus meritum cedit” (shall allow him more fructuose merit; I.xvii, Paquelin 1875–77, 50; I.31, Halligan 1979, 159). Most significant here, however, is Mechtild’s strange and unusual depiction of the roots of the tree dynamically emerging from their underground habitat to form a type of aboveground bower in a dramatic “unearthing” of what normally remains hidden underground. Able to be read according to orthodox theology in the first instance (Christ as/on the Tree of

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Life that is rooted in the “soil” of humanity), there are, however, far more complex and disruptive meanings attached to this image that require closer examination. In a recent study by Christy Wampole (2016) of the ubiquitous metaphor of the tree and its “rootedness” within human culture, Wampole argues for the root as a powerfully subconscious image—indeed a “figure for the subconscious itself” (2016, 18). For Wampole, the root is representative of “a matricial impression, an irrecuperable home where one’s character and body were still in their embryonic phases” (ibid.) Always already symptomatic of irredeemably lost maternal origins, the ubiquitous appearance of the root as metaphor is, for Wampole, part of an “umbilical memory of attachment” that brings uterine traces into consciousness and therefore into language. In its overlooked ability to make sense of these traces, the root, as the taboo, the illicit, and the abject, bridges the gulf between the earth and heavens in its ability to generate a visible fruitfulness and affirmation (2016, 24). Read in this capacity, Mechtild’s profusion of visible roots emerging from the dark earth into the light of the church/world brings the always already feminine of the prediscursive subconscious into the realm of articulation. Moreover, in the light of Wampole’s further suggestion (2016, 5) that the subconscious and the mystical are both entirely “root based,” we see Mechtild’s tree and her gardens functioning clearly in terms of a feminine “grammar” of mystical insight inherent to the garden’s cyclical “syntax” (MacCannell 1990, 95). As such, the rooted tree in the visionary hortus conclusus is in a position—and literally so—to give utterance to “the unsayable aspects of the psyche”—or, indeed, in the case of both Gertrude and Mechtild, the unsayable aspects of the mystical experience (Wampole 2016, 19). Indeed, this would explain the later reappearance of the tree in Mechtild’s text, first as fruit-laden excrescences emerging from Christ’s heart and then again as an enormous tree, spanning the entire world, the heavens. and the purgatorial realm (I.xxx and I.ix, Paquelin 1875–7, 104, 30–31; I.66 and II.40, Halligan 1979, 270, 403). In the first instance, this “arboris pulcherrimae” (fairest tree) forms a rooted vine, which, like the uterine garden of the Song of Songs, flows with wine and honey. In the second instance, the transubstantiated host on the monastic altar during the Feast of the Nativity morphs not into the sacrificial lamb of orthodox theology, but into a tree rooted in the altar itself, bearing leaves inscribed with gold. This time, Mechtild is explicit in her own confirmation of the vision as a language, a grammar and a syntax with which to bring into language the otherwise inarticulate and unutterable mystical experience: for Mechtild, “sic tota conversatio ejus habebatur in arbore scripta” (thus all his [Christ’s] conversation was written in the tree), with its height ultimately speaking “Christi divinitatem” (Christ’s divinity; I.ix, Paquelin 1875–77, 30; II.40, Halligan 1979, 403). Gertrude similarly presents her trees as a “language” rooted within the body, linking it also to the nuptial poetics of the Song of Songs by presenting

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herself as a scion grafted onto the “root” of Christ’s side wound as she unites with him. Redolent with a powerful sexual charge, Gertrude’s grafted self therefore injects her arboreal hermeneutics with additional charge and potency: [I]pse amantissimus Jesus per vaporem amoris sui vulnerati Cordis eam sibi attrahere videbatur, et abluere in aqua inde profluneti, deinde irrigare ipsam in sanguine vivificante sui Cordis. Ad quod illa ex minutissimo carbone convalescens, crevit in viriditatem arboris. . . . Post haec dum illa corpus Christi sumpsisset, et, ut supra dictum est, animam suam, in similitudine arboris conspiceret radicem habere fixam in vulnere lateris Jesu Christi, per ipsum vulnus tamquam per radicem, novo quodam mirabili modo sensit se quasi per singulos ramos simul, et fructus, atque folia penetrari a virtute humanitatis simul et divinitatis. (III.xviii, Paquelin 1875, 152) Her most loving Jesus seemed to draw her toward himself by the breath of love of his pierced heart, and to wash her in the water flowing from it and then to sprinkle her with the life-giving blood of his heart. With this action, she began to revive . . . and grew into a green tree, whose branches were divided in three. . . . Afterward, when she had received the body of Christ, she beheld her soul, as was said above, in the likeness of a tree fixing its roots in the wound of the side of Jesus Christ; she felt in some new and marvelous way that there was passing through this wound, as through a root, and penetrating into all her branches and fruit and leaves a wondrous sap which was the virtue of the humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ. (III.18, Winkworth 1993, 176–177) By the time Gertrude and Mechtild were writing, root grafting was a well-established practice in western Europe, although it did not become a popular means of plant-improvement without bearing cultural baggage. Introduced as a form of asexual propagation to improve rootstock, nevertheless folkloric treatments tended to associate it with human sexuality— and of the illicit kind (Mudge, Janick, Scofield and Goldschmidt 2009, 460; see also McAvoy, Skinner and Tyers in press). Here, however, we see Gertrude produce an image in which all these associations conglomerate to produce a language of flourishing that unites her with God: by grafting herself onto Christ she not only perfects her own “rootstock” but allows it to emerge from the soil within which, as a phallogocentrically defined woman, it has long been buried, producing in the process a “new” language with which to articulate the hitherto inexpressible. Indeed, both Gertrude and Mechtild, on their own admission, frequently struggle with such inexpressibility, constrained as they are by the “old root” language that initially presents as the only one available to them and that, in a

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woman’s hands, can prove particularly dangerous. As Gertrude confesses early in her text, pertractare coepi quam difficile vel etiam impossibile mihi foret talem invenire sensum sive verba, quibus sine scandalo ad humanum intellectum saepe dicta produci possent. (II.10, Paquelin 1875, 79) I began to consider how difficult, not to say impossible, it would be for me to find the right expressions and words for all the things that were said to me, so as to make them intelligible on a human level without danger of scandal. (II.10, Winkworth 1993, 109) But find the right expressions and words she does, digging up and exposing the “old root” and the female body on which it feeds to offer an approximation of the link she has forged between the unconscious, the feminine, the visionary, and the mystical. Mechtild, too, describes her own mystical union with Christ in very similar terms, again drawing on a conglomerated imagery from the Song of Songs and the arboreal with which to express it. In one highly dramatic encounter, for example, Mechtild is invited by Christ to drink from the vine tree within the “garden” of his sacred heart. In a deeply erotic, slow-motion narrative, she tells how she gently inclined her head to the mellifluous tendrils of his wound (“vulnus melliflui”) and drank her fill thereof. Still unsatiated, she put her mouth to the vine again and “ibi etiam de Corde Christi suavissimo esuxit fructum dulcissimum, quem assumens de Corde Dei in os suum posuit” (there also she drew out from Christ’s sweet heart the most delightful fruit, which she took off the Divine Heart and put in her mouth; II.xvi, Paquelin 1875–77, 150; II.xviii, Halligan 1979, 352). Like Gertrude’s grafting narrative, the grape in Mechtild’s mouth, sucked from the tree rooted in Christ’s side, intensifies the arboreal, erotic charge, leading Christ to profess to Mechtild that the only fruit he has ever desired is her utter delight in him— her mystical jouissance. This time, the sexual charge remains so present and so potent that for a moment it eludes all representation in language, drawing from Mechtild a primal utterance of abandon and returning its articulation to the semiotic realm of the prelinguistic she has momentarily exposed: “Eia, eia: Amor, amor, amor!” (O, O: Love, love, love!), she cries (II.xvi, Paquelin 1875–77, 150; II.xviii, Halligan 1979, 353). This opening up soon makes way for another type of outpouring: the source of her ecstasy, the divine lover himself, morphs from vine tree to fruit to divine mother and, in his declaration to Mechtild, echoes Gertrude’s Christ in confirming the “roots” of this complex hermeneutical mix to be ultimately both matrixial and maternal: Tu matrem tuam nominabas MINNE, et amor meus erit mater tua; et sicut filii sugunt matres suas, sic et tu ab eas suges internam

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consolationem, suavitem inenerrabilem, et illa te cibabit et potabit ac vestiet, et omnibus necessaitatibus tuis, velut mater filiam suam unicam, te procurabit. (II.xvi, Paquelin 1875–77, 150; II.xviii, Halligan 1979, 353) You shall name your mother MINNE, and my love shall be your mother; and just as children nurse from their mothers, so you shall nurse from them their internal comfort and unerring sweetness. And she will feed you, give you drink, clothe you and provide you with all necessary things, as a mother tends her only daughter. The Middle High German term Minne is one used frequently within the context of the Devotio Moderna, especially in Beguine contexts. It best translates as “love,” in the abstract, elevated or personified sense and, like many allegorical personifications, was frequently gendered female. (On the term Minne and other mystical terminology in the later Middle Ages, see, e.g., Rudy 2013, 67–100) What we see in the writing of both Gertrude and Mechtild, therefore, is a confident unearthing of the “old root” long buried in the sacred hortus conclusus and the exposure of the “kind of feminine sexuality that might flourish outside of domestic relationships,” cited previously (MacCannell 1990, 96), and that is also of such importance to Irigaray in her own work. These arboreal representations insist on the place of the maternal and matrixial within Christ, within Helfta, within all of us. In Gertrude’s and Mechtild’s hands, moreover, human transcendence is only possible via this route: that is to say via the transformed hermeneutics of the hortus conclusus, once wrested free of the its male-constructed walls.

Conclusion Both Gertrude of Helfta and Mechtild of Hackeborn worked within the exegetical models they had inherited from an intensely patriarchal tradition, particularly those connected to the negatively freighted Garden of Eden and the masculinized acrobatics imposed on the Song of Songs. Nevertheless, their lives spent from early infancy among women in Helfta, conversing, praying, and singing alongside other women on a daily basis, reading each other’s works and aiding in their composition, facilitated an avoidance of many of the psychological pitfalls of being immersed within the types of hierarchical gender constraints operating more widely outside the nunnery walls—ones that Soja (1989, 80) recognizes as a part of a “purposeful social practice” to delineate and constrain space. In turn, this allowed for a creative and insightful recasting of exegetical tradition and the contained spaces of its articulation in the light of a deeply personal and yet shared access to a female imaginary that rejected the excesses of necrophilic sublimation and envisioned space as labile and contingent. With much of their mystical insights focusing on a feminine Christ and his greening capacity within continually reworked matrixial garden settings, both women reveal,

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too, the arbitrary and reductive phallocentric underpinnings of language that have long served to keep Derrida’s “old root” firmly buried. By actively turning back toward Eden and the Song of Songs, and inward towards their own Helfta community and each other, and by fully investing themselves in the reworked poetics of all these superimposed realms, both Gertrude and Mechtild permit the walled garden’s fruitful excess to spill out, escape its own boundaries, and provide a language with which to describe the ineffable.

Bibliography Astell, Ann W., 1990. The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Borchardt, Rudolph, 2006. The Passionate Gardener, trans. Henry Martin. New York: McPherson and Co. Brownlee, Kevin, and Syvia Huot, 1991. Rethinking the “Romance of the Rose”: Text, Image, Reception. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 2015. Stone. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Conan, Michel, ed., 2007. Sacred Gardens and Landscapes: Ritual and Agency. Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library. Day, Mabel, 1921. “The Life of Adam and Eve.” In The Wheatley Manuscript, edited by Mabel Day, 76–99. EETS o.s 155. London: Oxford University Press. Delameau, Jean, 2000. History of Paradise: The Garden of Eden in Myth and Tradition, trans. Matthew O’Connell. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Derrida, Jacques, 1975. “The Purveyor of Truth.” Yale French Studies 52: 31–113. Derrida, Jacques, 1977. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. de Wit, Saskia, and Rob Aben, 1999. The Enclosed Garden: History and Development of the Hortus Conclusus and Its Reintroduction into the Present-Day Urban Landscape. Uitgeverij: 010 Publishers. Engh, Line Cecelie, 2014. Gendered Identities of Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs: Performing the Bride. Turnhout: Brepols. Finnegan, Mary Jeremy, O. P., 1991. The Women of Helfta: Scholars and Mystics. Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press. Foucault, Michel, 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16.1: 22–27. Francis, Mark, and Randolph T. Hester, Jr., eds., 1990. The Meaning of Gardens. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Fry, Timothy, ed., 1981. The Rule of St Benedict in Latin and English with Notes. Collegeville, MI: Liturgical Press. Gharipour, Mohammad, 2011. “Transferring and Transforming the Boundaries of Pleasure: Multifunctionality of Gardens in Medieval Persia.” Garden History 39.2: 249–262. Halligan, Theresa, ed., 1979. The Booke of Gostlye Grace of Mechtild of Hackeborn. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Hellgardt, Ernst, 2013. “Latin and the Vernacular: Mechthild of Magdeburg— Mechthild of Hackeborn—Gertrude of Helfta.” In A Companion to Mysticism and Devotion in Northern Germany in the Late Middle Ages, edited by Elizabeth Andersen, Henrike Lähnemann, and Anne Simon, 131–155. Leiden: Brill. Herbert McAvoy, Liz, Patricia Skinner, and Theresa Tyers, in press. “Strange Fruits: Grafting, Foreigners and the Garden Imaginary in northern France and Germany, 1250–1350.” Speculum.

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Herbert McAvoy, Liz, and Diane Watt, eds., 2012. The History of British Women’s Writing, 700–1500. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Horn, Walter, and Ernest Born, 1979. The Plan of St Gall: A Study of the Architecture and Economy of, and Life in, a Paradigmatic Carolingian Monastery. 3 vols. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Hunt, John Dixon, ed., 1996. The Italian Garden: Art, Design and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Irigaray, Luce, 2013. In the Beginning She Was. London, New Delhi, New York, and Sydney: Bloomsbury. Jantzen, Grace M., 1998. Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kristeva, Julia, 1994. “Le bonheur des beguines.” In Le Jardin Clos de L’âme: L’imaginaire des religieuses dan les Pays-Bas du Sud, depuis le 13e siècle, edited by Paul Vandenbroeck, 167–177. Brussels: Martial et Snoeck. Larson, Victoria, 2013. “A Rose Blooms in the Winter: The Tradition of the Hortus Conclusus and Its Significance as Devotional Emblem.” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 52.4: 303–312. MacCannell, Dean, 1990. “Landscaping and the Unconscious.” In The Meaning of Gardens, edited Mark Francis and Randolph T. Hester, Jr., 94–101. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Matter, E. Ann, 1990. The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. McLean, Theresa, 1981. Medieval English Gardens. London: Collins. Meyvaert, Paul, 1986. “The Medieval Monastic Garden.” In Medieval Gardens, edited by Elisabeth Blair MacDougall, 25–53. Dumbarton Oaks: Harvard University Press. Miller, Naomi, 1986. “Paradise Regained: Medieval Garden Fountains.” In Medieval Gardens, edited by Elisabeth Blair MacDougall, 137–153. Dumbarton Oaks: Harvard University Press. Mudge, Ken, Jules Janick, Steven Scofield, and Eliezer E. Goldschmidt, 2009. “A History of Grafting.” Horticultural Reviews 35: 437–493. Muessig, Carolyn, and Ad Putter, eds., 2007. Envisaging Heaven in the Middle Ages. London and New York: Routledge. Murdoch, Brian, and J. A. Tasioulas, eds., 2002. The Apocryphal Lives of Adam and Eve. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Nemes, Balázs J., 2013. “Text Production and Authorship: Gertrude of Helfta’s Legatus divinae pietatis.” In A Companion to Mysticism and Devotion in Northern Germany in the Late Middle Ages, edited by Elizabeth Andersen, Henrike Lähnemann and Anne Simon, 103–130. Leiden: Brill. Paquelin, D. L., ed., 1875–77. Revelationes Gertrudianae ac Mechtildianae. 2 vols. Paris: Oudin. Pogue Harrison, Robert, 2008. Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Rudy, Gordon, 2013. The Mystical Language of Sensation in the Later Middle Ages. London and New York: Routledge. Sandars, N. K., tr., 1960. The Epic of Gilgamesh. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Soja, Edward W., 1989. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London and New York: Verso. Steinert, Ulrike, 2012. “K. 263+10934: A Tablet with Recipes Against the Abnormal Flow of a Woman’s Blood.” Sudhoffs Archiv 96.1: 64–94. Viellillard-Baron, Michel, 2007. “Religious and Lay Rituals in Japanese Gardens during the Heian Period (784–1185).” In Sacred Gardens and Landscapes: Ritual and Agency, edited by Michel Conan, 57–66. Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Library.

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Voaden, Rosalynn, 1996. “The Company She Keeps: Mechtild of Hackeborn in Late Medieval Devotional Compilations.” In Prophets Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Late Medieval England, edited by Rosalynn Voaden, 51–70. Cambridge: York Medievalist Press. Wampole, Christy, 2016. Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Whiston Spirn, Anne, 1998. The Language of Landscape. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Winkworth, Margaret, tr., 1993. Gertrude of Helfta, the Herald of Divine Love. Mahwah, NY: Paulist Press.

Part II

The Historical Garden

3

Rills and Romance Gardens at the Castles of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth and Edward I in Wales Spencer Gavin Smith

Introduction At the turn of the fourteenth century King Edward I of England was in the process of constructing a series of castles along the coast of North Wales to secure the conquest of the Kingdom of Gwynedd. These structures, surviving in varying stages of completion and under the weight of various national and international designations are at the hub of a tourist industry in a country sometimes called “The Land of Castles.” The castles of Beaumaris, Caernarfon, Conwy, and Harlech together were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986 as the “Castles and Town Walls of King Edward in Gwynedd” (UNESCO 1986). Now in the care of Cadw, the historic environment service of the Welsh government, a series of guidebooks has been produced that places the military interpretation of the Edwardian castles at the heart of any discussion about them and their place in medieval history. Much has been written about the Edwardian castles from a military perspective, but considerable information survives historically and archaeologically to tell us about the gardens constructed with these castles and how they relate to their towns and associated wider landscape. Importantly, archaeological evidence also survives from a castle of the princes of Gwynedd, along with documentary material that has not been discussed in detail, demonstrating that gardens and gardening were as important to them as to their English successors. In a paper titled “Royal Gardens in Medieval England,” published in 1986, the architectural historian Howard Colvin wrote as a final sentence, “In short, what English medieval royal gardens are now in need of is not so much a historian as an archaeologist” (Colvin 1986, 21). With two of the six volumes of his The History of the Kings Works devoted to the medieval period, and having worked closely with Arnold Taylor on the documentary evidence for the Edwardian castles of Wales, he was perhaps in the perfect position to make this statement. Their work, in addition to that undertaken by another architectural historian, John Harvey, to compile Mediaeval Gardens, published five years previously (Harvey 1981), provided an excellent foundation from where the subject could progress. However, this has

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not been as rapid as has been hoped, perhaps best illustrated by the fact that a conference in 2007 on the impact of the Edwardian Castle in Wales, only one paper, by the landscape and castle historian Robert Liddiard, highlighted the importance of further detailed research into the gardens and landscapes of both castles and llysoedd, having discussed several examples from Wales in his book (Liddiard 2010, 195–196; Liddiard 2005). The castle and llys gardens of thirteenth-century Gwynedd to be discussed here were created for two women, one French and the other Castilian. Both were from royal families, and it should be expected that their gardens would reflect, to some extent, their origins. Work by Sara Cockerill in her recent biography of Eleanor of Castile has only served to highlight how important gardens, gardening and most of all a sense of adventure were to the wife of Edward I (Cockerill 2014). Intriguingly, it remains a possibility that some of the gardens were created as a memorial by Edward to his dead wife. Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, prince of Gwynedd in the early thirteenth century and responsible for Dolbadarn Castle held his French wife Joan in as high a regard, with Danna Messer’s recent research only serving to reinforce this point (Messer 2014). It is perhaps telling that the coffin lid attributed as belonging to Joan has the lower half of her torso wrapped in a bower-like tangle of leaves and fruit (Gresham 1968, 64).

Documentary Evidence for Royal Gardens—Welsh Sources While the range of medieval documentary sources available for the study of medieval Welsh gardens is not as extensive as that preserved for medieval English gardens, by combining a range of material recorded by contemporary Welsh and English administrators, it is possible to build a picture of the extent of Welsh royal gardens which had been developed prior to the Edwardian Conquest. One of these sources is Cyfraith Hywel or “The Law of Hywel Dda,” published in 1986 as a translated and edited composite text, using mainly the text known as the “Iorwerth Redaction” compiled in the early thirteenth century in northwest Wales (Jenkins 1986). The various redactions of the laws have been studied previously to understand their scope regarding women, the church, and the relationship of the king to his court (Jenkins and Owen 1980; Pryce 1993; Charles-Edwards, Owen and Russell 2000). However, the information they contain on gardens and the associated material has not been accorded the same comparable level of study. As an example of the detail recorded, one manuscript of the “Blegrwyd Redaction” of Cyfraith Hywel records “[t]hat house he [Hywel] caused to be constructed of white rods as a lodge for him in hunting when he came to Dyfed” (Richards 1954, 23). Such temporary structures, woven from willow, are commonly depicted in medieval art and literature and can be known variously as a hide, a bower, or an arbor depending on the use to which they are put in a landscape context (for hunting hide, Almond 2003, 99–100). For example, one of the cywyddau or poems by Dafydd ap

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Gwilym (ca.1315/1320–ca.1350/1370), regarded as one of the great poets of the medieval period, is “Y Deildy/The House of Leaves” and describes a tryst in a bower (www.dafyddapgwilym.net/eng/3win.htm Poem No.37), and an arbor was recorded in the garden of Holt Castle (Denbighshire) circa 1540 (Palmer 1991, 60). To date, however, there has been little archaeological survey and excavation to assist in identifying these ephemeral structures (but see Whittle 2000, 87–88, and compare Cooper 1999). Within the law texts there are references to the importance of gardens and the trees planted within them and references to gardens in relation to the laws on corn damage (Jenkins 1986, 188–189, 204, 209). The Welsh royal court was by its very nature peripatetic, perhaps best demonstrated in Pedair Cainc y Mabinogi or The Four Branches of the Mabinogi, the most well-known piece of medieval Welsh prose literature (Davies 2007). Specifically, the places where the royal court met evolved over time, with Thomas Charles-Edwards (2004) highlighting the variant names these places could possess, including gorsedd, dadl, and llys, all names encountered within the Pedair Cainc. By the time of the twelfth and thirteenth century, lawbooks, particularly the “Iorwerth Redaction,” demonstrated that the definition of llys had evolved to mean a complex of buildings to which the members of the royal court traveled. A llys could also refer to a castle functioning as a meeting place, but not every castle served as a llys (Johnstone 2000).

Documentary Evidence for Royal Gardens—English Sources Following the Edwardian Conquest of 1282, a series of extents were taken by English administrators to record each of the administrative districts—or commotes—of North Wales (edited in Carr 2001 (Merioneth 1284); Smith 2009 (Anglesey 1284); Ellis 1924 (Bromfield and Yale 1315); Vinogradoff and Morgan 1914 (Denbigh 1334); Ellis 1838 (Anglesey and Caernarfon 1352); Jones 1933 (Chirkland 1391–3) and Slack 1951 (Oswestry 1393– 1607)). While not all the extents have survived, and some remain unpublished (British Library Additional MS.10013 [Bromfield and Yale 1391]), the geographical distribution of those identified provide an indication of just how extensive the network of Welsh royal gardens was by the third quarter of the thirteenth century. Within the former kingdom of Gwynedd, royal gardens are recorded as part of the llysoedd of Caernarfon (National Grid Reference SH 478 628); Talybont (NGR SH 595 039), Llanfaes (NGR SH 605 778), Rhosyr (NGR SH420 655) Cemaes (NGR SH 375 930) and Pennal (NGR SH 699 004), worth 20s, 20s, 6s 8d, 3s, 40d, and 20d per year, respectively. A royal garden is also recorded at part of the llys at Nefyn (NGR SH 308 407; Jones Pierce 1931). Other later sources record land known as Gardd y Llys or “Garden of the Court” in Aberffraw (NGR SH 354 689) and Gardd y Neuadd or “The Hall Garden” in Trefriw (NGR SH 780 630), in close association with the proposed locations of the llysoedd

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proposed for these locations (Johnstone 2000, based on Johnstone and Riley 1995).

Dolbadarn Castle Garden and Little Park (Scheduled Monument CN066/Grade 1 Listed Building 21854) One of the thirteenth-century stone castles of the princes of Gwynedd retains clear archaeological evidence for an enclosed garden within the castle curtilage. Dolbadarn castle is situated on a promontory between the Padarn and Peris lakes to the south of the present-day village of Llanberis in northwest Wales. As noted earlier, the Welsh castles have not seen as detailed a program of study as the Edwardian castles, and the author has undertaken the only detailed study of the building fabric since the conservation and restoration work of the 1940s and 1950s was subsequently published in an Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales (RCAHMW) volume in 1960 (RCAHMW 1960, 165–168; Smith 2014). The garden identified by the study occupies the triangular open space at the northern end of the enclosure, and within the length of the eastern curtain wall, the RCAHMW investigators identified a garderobe chute (RCAHMW 1960, 168; Smith 2014, 69). The garden is separated from the rest of the castle by a large hall extending the full width between the western and eastern curtain walls (Smith 2014, 69). The hall would appear to be the accommodation provided for Joan, daughter of King John of England and wife of Welsh prince Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, and her retinue, consisting of eight titled officers (Stacey 2000, 55). While the interior of the hall was excavated during the conservation and consolidation work of 1949, the area the garden occupies was not disturbed (Taylor 1949a, plate b). In addition to the hall and garden, to the west of the Dolbadarn castle there was a little, or inner, park. This type of park was constructed near a high-status residence from the twelfth century onward (Richardson 2007, 39). The first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1888 recorded this area as Parc Bach.

Gardens at Rhuddlan Castle (Scheduled Monument FL004/ Grade 1 Listed Building 14977) The earliest Edwardian castle in Wales with historical evidence for royal gardens is Rhuddlan, situated on the eastern bank of the River Clwyd in northeast Wales. This castle and the town that was built to accompany it were begun in 1277 (Quinnell et al. 1994, 9). They replaced an earlier Norman motte and bailey castle and town and Saxon settlement, all of which were subject to archaeological excavation between 1969 and 1982 (Quinnell et al. 1994). The Edwardian castle was taken into state care in the early 1940s, and A. J. Taylor was responsible for supervising the first archaeological excavations and the subsequent presentation of the monument to

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the public, including researching and writing the accompanying guidebook (Taylor 1949b). Documentary evidence survives recording the existence for two royal gardens at Rhuddlan, one of which lay within the inner ward of the castle (Taylor 1963, 324), and the second located by the north (or town) gate of the outer ward of the castle (Stevenson 1912, 301). Both references date to the 1280s, and the information recorded for the garden of the inner ward is perhaps the most comprehensive for any of the Edwardian castle gardens. The garden was laid out around the castle well, a feature still in situ in the center of the inner ward. It comprised a fishpond, which had seats arranged around it, and the fishpond was made watertight with clay from a nearby marsh. The structure above the well was roofed, and six thousand turves were used to form a lawn, which was fenced with cask staves (Taylor 1963, 324). Using the documentary evidence, the garden designer Dr Sylvia Landsberg offered an interpretation of what the inner ward garden may have looked like (Landsberg 2004, 128–130). Despite this level of detail, however, the inner ward has yet to be examined for evidence of the garden and its relationship to the timber-framed buildings constructed against the inner wall of the castle. The documentary evidence for the royal garden which was located by the north (or town) gate of the outer ward of the castle is not as comprehensive as that for the inner ward, but importantly, it refers to the garden as a herber (Stevenson 1912, 301). A herber was an enclosed garden and was specifically a pleasure garden, rather than something planted in a more utilitarian fashion (Harvey 1981, 4). The precise location of the herber has not been discussed previously, but sufficient archaeological evidence survives to locate it within the landscape of the Edwardian castle and associated town. A plan of medieval Rhuddlan created as part of the project “Mapping Medieval Townscapes: A Digital Atlas of the New Towns of Edward I” shows that there was a large open space between the north (or town) gate of the castle and the southeastern burgage plots of the town (Lilley 2010, 101). The early nineteenthcentury tithe map for Rhuddlan shows a subrectangular plot of land outside the north gate between the River Elwy and the access route to the town that appears to be the correct shape and size for a secluded royal garden by the river (map accessed through “Cynefin: The Tithe Maps of Wales” website: http://cynefin.archiveswales.org.uk). This plot of land was impacted when material removed from the castle ditch in the late 1940s was partly dumped across it to improve the public access to the castle. The impact of the clearance is particularly noticeable in the difference between photographs C892534, WAW008006 (taken in 1947) and C868623, AP_2009_4135 (taken in 2009) and the depth of material removed to be dumped can be seen in photograph C5399, DI2010_2243 (taken in 1949) (www.coflein.gov.uk/en/site/92914/ details/rhuddlan-castle).

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Gardens at Conwy Castle (Scheduled Monument CN004/ Grade 1 Listed Building 3250) The town and castle of Conwy were founded on and around the precinct of a preexisting Cistercian abbey at the mouth of the river of the same name. Constructed between 1283 and 1287, King Edward I made use of some of the abbey buildings as temporary accommodation, as well as constructing additional temporary buildings and structures (Beresford 1967, 42). As part of this work a camera or private chamber and a garden were constructed for the use of Queen Eleanor in June 1283. The description of the lawn of the garden being made from turves and fenced with cask staves is like the garden created within the inner ward of Rhuddlan Castle (Taylor 1963, 324). This garden was situated between the West Barbican of the castle and the Mill Gate, with the town wall forming the southern boundary. It is referred to as “the gret garden without the Castell” in 1531 (Taylor 2003, 35). In a drawing dated circa 1600 it is shown as being laid out with six different patterns of geometrically planted parterres or flowerbeds and a large building at its western end (Taylor 2003; for a reproduction of the drawing Taylor 2007, 15). The area was excavated in 1963 and 1964 to create a new car park for visitors to the town and castle (Butler 1965; Butler and Evans 1979). Evidence for a series of buildings within a garden was recovered, and the quality of the finds, including majolica pottery of Mediterranean or North African origin and a fine glass beaker, in addition to butchered red deer bone, suggests royal occupation of the site (on the pottery, Hurst 1968). Taken in conjunction with the evidence from the other castles this suggests that one of these buildings was Queen Eleanor’s camera. Additional excavation was undertaken in this area in 1993 and identified further possible in situ medieval garden soil (Carver, Riley and Dutton 1993, 5). The design and construction of another garden at Conwy by Edward I, this time within the castle walls, formed a fundamental part of the design process of the Inner Ward of Conwy Castle. Here an enclosed garden with access via a watergate was created and survived in use for several centuries thereafter. The three towers which are part of the garden (or East Barbican) wall are described as roofed in an account of 1301, although the earliest surviving reference to the herbarium itself dates from 1316 and vines or trailing plants are recorded as growing in the garden in the late fourteenth century (Taylor 2007, 43; Taylor 1972, 35). This garden survived into the post-medieval period, referred to in 1531 as “the litell garden” (Taylor 1972, 35). In a drawing circa 1600 it is shown as being laid out with four different patterns of geometrically planted parterres or flowerbeds, with the final reference to a garden on the site is in 1627 (Taylor 2007, 15). Archaeological evidence from the site of the garden is limited, but a highly decorated medieval strap-end was found within it, although the exact circumstances have not been recorded (Butler and Evans 1979, 86, item 7).

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Unfortunately, the lower part of the watergate access stairs into the garden has now been lost. They were recorded on both the Hatfield House drawing of circa 1600 and an illustration by Samuel and Nathaniel Buck Brothers in 1742 (Taylor 1972, 35). The construction of a suspension bridge by Thomas Telford in 1828 used the base of the East Barbican to anchor one end of the suspension bridge’s cables, with the road which crossed the bridge cutting across the site of the watergate. In 1958 a new, wider road bridge was constructed parallel to the 1828 bridge, further obscuring the base of the watergate from view (Taylor 2007, 43–44).

Gardens at Caernarfon Castle (Scheduled Monument CN079/Grade 1 Listed Building 3814) The architecturally incomparable castle of Caernarfon is situated on the confluence of the rivers Seiont and Cadnant with the Menai Straits in North West Wales. Construction began in 1283, and an earlier motte and bailey castle were as incorporated within its eastern end (Beresford 1967, 44). While the castle and, to a lesser extent, the town walls have been the subject of academic study, the castle gardens and other associated features have been neglected, to the point where they do not appear within the narrative of the castle guidebook (Taylor 2004). The location traditionally ascribed to a castle garden is now occupied by the Y Maes/Castle Square, an open space to the east of the castle and outside the town walls (RCAHMW 1960, 152). This attribution was made by Charles Peers when he thought that a small postern gate, known as the “Green Gate” opened out into the garden (Peers 1917, 26; RCAHMW 1960, 117, fig. 99). A reassessment of the archaeological and historical evidence demonstrates that there were, in fact, two castle gardens and that the designed landscape associated with these was one of the most sophisticated in medieval Europe. In early 1283, as the temporary timber royal apartments were constructed just to the east of the planned footprint of the castle, a lawn was also laid for the queen (Taylor 1986, 80). The location of this lawn by 1295 was known as the “King’s Garden,” which cost 24s to dig out and enclose with a hedge (Peers 1917, 9; Taylor 1986, 89). On the cartographer John Speed’s map of Caernarfon, published in 1611–1612 it is noticeable that the Shire Hall building is on a different alignment to the boundaries of the town burgage plots (Speed 1603–1611). It is likely that this misalignment is a survival of an arrangement very similar to that found in the Great Garden at Conwy (Butler 1965; Butler and Evans 1979). The name “King’s Garden” survived for this area of the town until the mid-nineteenth century when the new Shire Hall and County Gaol were built on the site (Jones 1889, 95). The construction of the second garden related to Caernarfon Castle, known in 1343 as the Prince’s Garden, was facilitated by the creation of a body of water known as the King’s Pond. The River Cadnant, literally

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translated as “Kept Stream,” was dammed, a process recorded in the Exchequer Accounts for 1285 at a cost of £121 7s 6d. An artificial swan’s nest was constructed in the middle of the pond in 1304–1305, and repairs to the pond undertaken in 1315–1316 (Peers 1917; RCAHMW 1960, 148 n.32; Carter 1969, 4; Whittle 1992, 10). The line of the dam, with a road across the top, is now occupied by a road known as Bridge Street, or in Welsh Y Bont Bridd, which translates as “The Earth Bridge.” The location of the King’s Pond is marked on the cartographer John Speed’s map of Caernarfon, published in 1611–1612 (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/ PR-ATLAS-00002-00061-00001/1). The pond survived, although much narrowed, to be recorded on John Wood’s map of 1834. Excavations in 1989 identified that there was a considerable depth of silt in the pool, and only the approximate northern edge of the pool could be identified with any degree of conviction by the archaeologists (Boyle 1989, 5). One of the uses to which the King’s Pond was put was to control the water passing through a cornmill. This mill was constructed on the northern side of the dam, roughly at the same time as the construction of the dam itself, and over one of three exit rills or races from the King’s Pond. In 2007, archaeological excavation at this location within a property on the northern side of Bridge Street identified part of the medieval bridge structure and identified a mill tail race dating from the post-medieval period. This mill tail race was constructed on the alignment of the tail race that fed the medieval cornmill (Davidson, Roberts and Evans 2008). The John Speed map of Caernarfon shows three water rills or races exiting the western side of the dam. The northern channel is the mill tail race, part of which was recorded in 2007 (and published in Davidson, Roberts, and Evans 2008). The southern race acted as an overflow, an arch of which was recorded in the Royal Commission volume for Central Caernarvonshire (1960) and reexamined in 1996 (RCAHMW 1960, 158; Davidson and Gwyn 1996, 10). The central water rill or race through the dam has not been discussed previously. Two different reconstruction drawings commissioned for the Caernarfon Castle guidebook depicts the three channels either flowing down an empty grassy bank or spilling out of channels in the dam wall (Taylor 2004, 12; A. J. Taylor 2004, 16). The central water rill, however, is fundamentally important within the design of the associated Prince’s Garden. In 2003 an archaeological assessment was undertaken prior to the demolition of a series of post-medieval buildings built between the northern tail race and the southern overflow channel (Gwyn 2003). The report not only referred to the area by its colloquial name of Tan y Bont, which translates as “under the bridge,” but also acknowledged the fact that the area had also been known as Skinner Street and Gardd’rafon, which translates as “river garden” (ibid., 1). There is evidence that a garden, possibly Gardd’rafon, was leased in this area in 1550 and a garden, occupying the space between the northern mill race and southern overflow race is depicted on a map dated to the late eighteenth century (National Library of Wales: Llanfair

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and Brynodol papers, D394; Caernarfon Record Office, XM/13954/6). Not previously noted, however, is that the central water channel depicted on the early seventeenth-century map by John Speed is also depicted on the map dated to the late eighteenth century. On the eastern side of Y Bont Bridd opposite the site of the medieval and later mill, the cartographer has depicted a buildup of sediment protruding out into the mill pool. A second buildup of sediment is depicted farther south along Y Bont Bridd. The depictions are deliberate, as the unknown cartographer does not repeat these features elsewhere along the eastern face of the structure. Sediment buildup of this nature usually occurs on the wall of a dammed face where a sluice gate has been fitted to allow the control of the water supply. A sluice gate is usually fitted in front of a mill wheel to allow the water flowing through the mill wheel to be stopped and repairs undertaken (Crossley 1994, 142–143). The evidence from the late eighteenth-century map suggests that the central water channel was also fitted with a sluice gate, allowing the water which flowed through Gardd’rafon to be stopped, presumably to allow repairs to the rill. On balance, it seems reasonable to suggest that Gardd’rafon and the Prince’s Garden were the same place and that the garden was built on a slope behind the dam of the King’s Pool. Excavation within Tan y Bont in 2003 following the demolition of the post-medieval buildings found garden soil at the southeastern corner of the site that appear to be a survival of latest phase of Gardd’rafon (Laws 2003). One method of access to the garden appears to have been by water. A royal barge is recorded as being used in Caernarfon in 1322 to carry stone for repairs for the town quay (Lewis 1912, 104–105). It would have been possible to bring a barge up the River Cadnant and under the bridge in front of the Exchequer or Great Gate to a point at the bottom of the garden. Perhaps the most notable of these gardens accessed by water was “The Pleasance in the Marsh,” a creation of King Henry V at Kenilworth Castle (Warwickshire): Harvey 1981, 106). Once the castle garden was no longer required as a private social space it was leased out to generate additional income. The tannery industry, in particular, made good use of this open space outside the town walls with a ready water supply to undertake their noxious and cloying industry (Crossley 1994, 219–220).

Garden at Harlech Castle (Scheduled Monument ME044/ Grade 1 Listed Building 25500) The Castle of Harlech on the west coast of Wales overlooking Tremadog Bay was begun in 1283 (Beresford 1967, 45). The inclusion of an enclosed and private garden within the castle seems to have been planned from the outset, the location of the which is suggested by a property survey of 1343 or earlier, which refers to the southwest tower of the Inner Ward as Turris Ultra Gardinum (Taylor 2002, 27, also known as the Mortimer Tower in a

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survey of 1564). There is considerable archaeological evidence for the form and function of the garden within the southern Middle Ward surviving in both the Inner and Middle Ward masonry. The Middle Ward on the southern side of the castle is divided into two uneven sized sections by a cross wall with an entrance through it, dated to the first phase of the castle’s construction (Taylor 2002, 7). The wall has two holes through its thickness that have not been commented on previously. The holes are subcircular in shape, and an original feature of the wall’s construction could be interpreted as “putlog holes,” used for wooden scaffolding poles to be inserted to allow for construction above head height. However, the height of the wall, their position in the wall structure, and the lack of other holes either side make this unlikely. These holes were constructed to allow people outside of the garden to view activities taking place without disturbing those using the garden. The use of a single hole would not allow someone using the hole to observe the whole garden space, but a pair of holes allows the whole garden to be observed. While on one level the holes through the garden wall may have served a practical purpose, they may also play on a scene depicted within the classical tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, a story commonly reproduced in various media in medieval art (Landsberg 2004, 60). In Pyramus and Thisbe, the lovers speak to each other through a crack in a wall as they are forbidden to meet each other by their respective families. The most familiar depiction of this scene is in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene I, and it quite possible that this or other similar tales were reenacted using this very permanent stage setting. An examination of the castle garderobe chutes reveals that the one from the “Garden Tower” extends the whole height of the tower and empties into the garden enclosure in the Middle Ward, terminating with a very compact trough (Coflein 1913). This suggests that any use of this garderobe chute was not allowed to build within the garden and that it was transferred directly to a composting facility nearby. One feature of the garden that has been discussed previously but not placed into the context of the garden is the corbelled garderobe, which projects over the southern wall of the Middle Ward (Taylor 2002, 28). Although the architectural parallels to other similar structures have been discussed, the architectural sophistication and presence of this garderobe within a royal garden have yet to be addressed (Coldstream 2010, 38). The garden at Harlech could have been a creation of Eleanor of Castile, and it would hardly be appropriate for a queen to have to make a long trek around the Middle Ward to either enter through the main Gatehouse or through an entrance in the West wall of the Inner Ward and then to a suitable garderobe. The construction of a garderobe within the castle garden, unfortunately now lacking its superstructure, would have resembled the towers in the East Barbican of Conwy castle complete with boarded roof, suggests that the garden was designed from the outset to be used for extended periods, and

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by association, this is likely to have included eating and drinking outside in the garden as well. The loss of much of the height of the south wall of the Middle Ward means it is difficult to interpret how much of the garden would have been in shade during the day, but the south wall would have been warmed by the sun, and it was the likely location for the planting of those climbing or trailing plants that can be trained up walls.

Conclusion As stated earlier, the military aspect of the Edwardian castles has been the predominant narrative, placed above the social or economic. Fortunately, the rehabilitation of the Edwardian castles into the imagination of a post– World War II Britain had a champion in the shape of the inspector of ancient monuments for Wales from 1946, Arnold Taylor. Without his pioneering research work, we would know far less about the interrelationships, both socially and architecturally, which led to the construction of Edwardian castles in Wales (Taylor 1986). By contrast, the Welsh castles within Taylor’s purview received far less attention. They, too, were cleared and consolidated for display to the public, but the chosen narrative, and in hindsight, the only one that could have been pursued, was to concentrate on how a war was won and not how it was lost (as an example, for the work on Dolbadarn Castle, see Taylor 1948, 1949a, 1950, 1951). It would take until 1983 for the Welsh castles of North Wales to be examined in detail and their variant forms identified and related to one another (Avent 1983). Had Richard Avent, a successor of Taylor’s in the post of inspector of ancient monuments for Wales, not died tragically early in 2006, he would surely have contributed far more to their understanding (Breeze 2006). His guidebooks provide an important collection of reference material and interpretation of much more ephemeral buildings and structures (e.g., Avent 2004). He also helped organize and lead the 2005 International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) UK summer meeting in Caernarfon on “The Castles and Town Walls of Edward I in Gwynedd” (Marshall 2005/6). Without this research being undertaken, the synthesis undertaken in this chapter would not have been possible. Absent from this paper on medieval gardens is any discussion of the plants that they would have contained. The work to rehabilitate the Edwardian, and later the Welsh, castles concentrated on the military narrative above all others, but there is still the opportunity to recover environmental evidence from within the gardens, and the excavations in the Vicarage Garden in Conwy demonstrate the potential of unexcavated castle gardens. In addition, the recognition of the large number of Welsh royal gardens in the llysoedd, and the fact that only one llys complex, that at Rhosyr, has been excavated—and then only partially—has meant that the potential for archaeological evidence, both environmental and structural, on these sites is still high (Johnstone 2000).

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An important point, although frequently overlooked in many studies of the high-status medieval garden, is that they could consist of both temporary and permanent planting and landscaping. Plants in ceramic pots would be carried as part of the baggage train of the royal court from place to place (Moorhouse 1991). It is perhaps too much of a stretch to suggest that the majolica ware found in Conwy forms the remains of plant pots for Eleanor’s garden, but an example of a medieval royal garden where the prevailing weather conditions, coupled with the relative remoteness of the castle location meant that plant transportation was a necessity can be seen at Tintagel Castle (Cornwall), where the foundations of the garden walls commissioned by Earl Richard, the second son of King John, are visible on the exposed plateau above the Atlantic Ocean (Rose 1994). Fostering of further interdisciplinary research into the development of the study of medieval gardens in North Wales is vital, with archaeologists, historians, and art and literature specialists all able to offer insights into the topic. Such work can only highlight the significance of an integral part of royal life in this period and raise the profile with the public who visit these monuments. In future, the inclusion of gardens in the interpretation of these medieval castle and llys complexes is perhaps the most important long-term legacy of this research.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Rob Evans for his assistance with identifying maps relating to Caernarfon and Professor Rob Liddiard, Dr. Kathryn Hurlock and Megan Cullinan for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

Bibliography Almond, R., 2003. Medieval Hunting. Stroud: Sutton. Avent, R., 1983. Castles of the Princes of Gwynedd. Cardiff: HMSO. Avent, R., 2004. Dolwyddelan Castle/Dolbadarn Castle/Castell Y Bere. Cardiff: Cadw. Beresford, M., 1967. New Towns of the Middle Ages. London: Lutterworth Press. Boyle, S. D., 1989. “King’s Mill Pool, Caernarfon.” Gwynedd Archaeological Trust unpublished report 21. Breeze, D., 2006. “Obituary Richard Avent.” The Independent, 10 August. www. independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/richard-avent-411375.html British Library, Additional MS. 10013 (extent of Bromfield and Yale, 1391). Butler, L. A. S., 1965. “Excavations in Conway, 1961–64.” Caernarvonshire Historical Society Transactions 26: 20–30. Butler, L. A. S., and D. H. Evans, 1979. “The Old Vicarage, Conway: Excavations, 1963–64.” Archaeologica Cambrensis 128: 40–103. Caernarfon Record Office: XM/13954/6. Carr, A. D., 2001. “The First Extent of Merioneth.” In History of Merioneth, 2, the Middle Ages, edited by J. B. Smith and Ll Smith, 702–716. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

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Carter, H., 1969. “Carnarvon.” In Historic Towns: Maps and Plans of Towns and Cities in the British Isles, 1, edited by M. D. Lobel and W. H. Johns, 1–7. www. historictownsatlas.org.uk/atlas/volume-i/historic-towns/caernarvon Carver, J., H. Riley, and L. A. Dutton, 1993. “Conwy Vicarage Car Park: Archaeological Assessment and Watching Brief.” Gwynedd Archaeological Trust, unpublished report 65. Charles-Edwards, T. M., 2004. “Gorsedd, Dadl, and Llys: Assemblies and Courts in Medieval Wales.” In Assembly Places and Practices in Medieval Europe, edited by A. Pantos and S. Semple, 95–108. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Charles-Edwards, T. M., M. E. Owen, and P. Russell, eds., 2000. The Welsh King and His Court. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Cockerill, S., 2014. Eleanor of Castile: The Shadow Queen. Stroud: Amberley. Coflein, 1913. Cadw Guardianship Monument Drawing of Harlech Castle: SE or Mortimer Tower: Cadw Ref: 86//78. Scale 1:30. Catalogue Number C22852. www.coflein.gov.uk/en/archive/6029678/details/504 Coldstream, N., 2010. “James of St George.” In The Impact of the Edwardian Castles in Wales, edited by D. M. Williams and J. R. Kenyon, 37–45. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Colvin, H. M., 1986. “Royal Gardens in Medieval England.” In Medieval Gardens: Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture 9, edited by Elisabeth Macdougall, 7–22. Washington: Dumbarton Oaks. Cooper, S., 1999. “Ornamental Structures in the Medieval Gardens of Scotland.” Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 129: 817–839. Crossley, D., 1994. Post-Medieval Archaeology in Britain. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Cynefin: The Tithe Maps of Wales Website. http://cynefin.archiveswales.org.uk Dafydd ap Gwilym. www.dafyddapgwilym.net/eng/3win.htm Poem No.37. Davidson, A., and D. Gwyn, 1996. “Eastgate Street, Caernarfon, Archaeological Assessment.” Gwynedd Archaeological Trust unpublished report 202. Davidson, A., J. Roberts, and R. Evans, 2008. “23–25 Bridge Street: Archaeological Excavation and Watching Brief.” Gwynedd Archaeological Trust unpublished report 716. Davies, S., tr., 2007. The Mabinogion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ellis, H., ed., 1838. Registrum Vulgariter Nuncupatum “The Record of Caernarvon.” London: Record Commission. Ellis, P., ed., 1924. The First Extent of Bromfield and Yale, A. D. 1315. Cymmrodorion Record Series 11. London: Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion. Gresham, C. A., 1968. Medieval Stone Carving in North Wales: Sepulchral Slabs and Effigies of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Gwyn, D., 2003. “Tan y Bont, Caernarfon: Archaeological Assessment”. Govannon Consultancy unpublished report GC62. Harvey, J., 1981. Mediaeval Gardens. London: Batsford. Hurst, J. G., 1968. “Near Eastern and Mediterranean Medieval Pottery Found in North West Europe.” Archaeologica Lundensia 3: 145–204. Jenkins, D., ed. and tr., 1986. The Law of Hywel Dda: Law Texts from Medieval Wales Translated and Edited. Llandysul: Gomer Press. Jenkins, D., and M. E. Owen, eds., 1980. The Welsh Law of Women. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Johnstone, N., 2000. “Llys and Maerdref: The Royal Courts of the Princes of Gwynedd.” Studia Celtica 33: 167–210. Johnstone, N., and H. Riley, 1995. “Llys and Maerdref: An Investigation into the Location of the Royal Courts of the Princes of Gwynedd.” Gwynedd Archaeological Trust, unpublished report 167.

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Jones, G. P., ed., 1933. The Extent of Chirkland 1391–93. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Jones, W. H., 1889. Old Karnarvon: A Historical Account of the Town of Carnarvon. Carnarvon: H. Humphreys. Jones Pierce, T., 1931. “Two Early Caernarvonshire Accounts, II: Section of Ministers Accounts (Sheriff).” Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 5: 149–154. Landsberg, S., 2004. The Medieval Garden. London: The British Museum Press. Laws, K., 2003. “Tan y Bont, Caernarfon: Archaeological Watching Brief.” Engineering Archaeological Services, unpublished EAS Client report 2003/30. Lewis, E. A., 1912. The Mediaeval Boroughs of Snowdonia. London: Henry Sotheran and Co. Liddiard, R., 2005. Castles in Context: Power, Symbolism and Landscape, 1066 to 1500. Bollington: Windgather Press. Liddiard, R., 2010. “A Research Agenda for the Edwardian Castles.” In The Impact of the Edwardian Castles in Wales, edited by D. M. Williams and J. R. Kenyon, 193–197. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Lilley, K. D., 2010. “The Landscapes of Edward’s New Towns.” In The Impact of the Edwardian Castles in Wales, edited by D. M. Williams and J. R. Kenyon, 99–113. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Marshall, P., 2005/6. “The ICOMOS UK Seminar Caernarfon.” Castle Studies Group Journal 19: 96–98. Messer, D., 2014. “The Uxorial Lifecycle and Female Agency in Wales in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries.” Unpublished PhD Thesis, Bangor University, Bangor, Wales. Moorhouse, S., 1991. “Ceramics in the Medieval Garden.” In Garden Archaeology, edited by A. E. Brown, 100–117. CBA Research Report 78. York: Council for British Archaeology. National Library of Wales: Llanfair and Brynodol papers D394. Palmer, A. N., 1991. The Town of Holt together with The Parish of Isycoed and Notes on the History of Bangor Is Y Coed. Wrexham: Bridge Books. Peers, C. R., 1917. “Caernarvon Castle.” Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion 33: 1–74. Pryce, H., 1993. Native Law and the Church in Medieval Wales. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Quinnell, H., M. Blockley, and P. Berridge, 1994. Excavation in Rhuddlan 1969– 1973. CBA Research Report 95. York: Council for British Archaeology. RCAHMW, 1960. Caernarvonshire 2: Central. London: HMSO. Richards, M., tr., 1954. The Laws of Hywel Dda. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Richardson, A., 2007. “The King’s Chief Delights: A Landscape Approach to the Royal Parks of Post-Conquest England.” In The Medieval Park: New Perspectives, edited by R. Liddiard, 27–48. Bollington: Windgather Press. Rose, P., 1994. “The Medieval Garden at Tintagel Castle.” Cornish Archaeology 33: 170–182. Slack, W. J., ed., 1951. The Lordship of Oswestry 1393–1607. Shrewsbury: Shropshire Archaeological Society. Smith, G. R., 2009. “The Extent of Anglesey, 1284.” Transactions of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society: 70–118. Smith, S. G., 2014. “Dolbadarn Castle, Caernarfonshire: A Thirteenth Century Royal Landscape.” Archaeology in Wales 53: 63–72. Speed, John, 1603–1611. The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain. http://cudl.lib. cam.ac.uk/view/PR-ATLAS-00002-00061-00001/1 Stacey, R. C., 2000. “King, Queen and Edling in the Laws of Court.” In The Welsh King and His Court, edited by T. M. Charles-Edwards, M. E. Owen, and P. Russell, 29–62. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

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Stevenson, W. H., ed. and tr., 1912. Calendar of Chancery Rolls: 1277–1326. London: HMSO. Taylor, A. J., 1948. “Ministry of Works, Ancient Monuments Branch: Report on Work in Wales, 1945–1948.” Archaeologica Cambrensis 100.1: 56–60. Taylor, A. J., 1949a. “Ministry of Works, Ancient Monuments Branch: Report on Work in Wales during Year Ended 30th June 1949.” Archaeologica Cambrensis 100.2: 267–270. Taylor, A. J., 1949b. Rhuddlan Castle, Flintshire. London: HMSO. Taylor, A. J., 1950. “Ministry of Works, Ancient Monuments Branch: Report on Work in Wales during Year Ended 30th June 1950.” Archaeologica Cambrensis 101.1: 77–82. Taylor, A. J., 1951. “Ministry of Works, Ancient Monuments Branch: Report on Work in Wales during Year Ended 30th June 1951.” Archaeologica Cambrensis 101.2: 113–117. Taylor, A. J., 1963. “Rhuddlan.” In The History of the King’s Works 1, edited by H. M. Colvin, 318–327. London: HMSO. Taylor, A. J., 1972. Conway Castle and Town Walls. London: HMSO. Taylor, A. J., 1986. The Welsh Castles of Edward I. London: Hambledon Press. Taylor, A. J., 2002. Harlech Castle. Cardiff: Cadw. Taylor, A. J., 2003. Conwy Castle. Cardiff: Cadw. Taylor, A. J., 2004. Caernarfon Castle. Cardiff: Cadw. Taylor, A. J., 2007. Conwy Castle. Cardiff: Cadw. UNESCO, 1986. “Castles and Town Walls of King Edward in Gwynedd.” http:// whc.unesco.org/en/list/374/ Vinogradoff, P., and F. Morgan, eds., 1914. Survey of the Honour of Denbigh, 1334. London: The British Academy. Whittle, E., 1992. The Historic Gardens of Wales. London: HMSO. Whittle, E., 2000. “The Historic Parks and Gardens of Carmarthenshire.” The Carmarthenshire Antiquary 36: 87–102. Williams, D. M., and J. R. Kenyon, eds., 2010. The Impact of the Edwardian Castles in Wales. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Wood, John, 1834. Map of Caernarfon. Caernarfon Record Office: XM/Maps/9537.

4

A Delite for the Senses Three Healing Plants in Medieval Gardens, the Lily, the Rose, and the Woodland Strawberry Theresa Tyers

Although garden fashions have changed over the centuries, the existence of gardening activity across Western Europe remains a constant factor. The extensive research that John Harvey, well known as an architectural historian and later as a garden historian, carried out led him to conclude that “in all times and places, building and gardening have gone hand in hand” and that “there were extensive gardens throughout Western Europe in the period between 1000 and 1500CE” (Harvey 1981, xv). Furthermore, the “evidence for extensive gardening of a utilitarian kind” of the High Middle Ages, is “immense and repetitive and need not be detailed” (ibid., 84). At varying times, gardens, sited either inside the walls or outside, have been associated with the development of medieval cities (McLean 2014 [1981], 83; Dyer 2000, ch. 7). Jerry Stannard’s research also studied the evidence for the types of medieval gardens cultivated in this period, distinguishing five main categories: the kitchen garden, the medicinal garden, the patrician garden, the cloister garden, and the pleasure garden (Stannard 1986, 77; see also Scully 2008). Alicia Amherst, in her classic work on English gardens, has described the design of monastic gardens, such as those under the control of the bishop of Ely, and the associated cultivation and use of medicinal plants within those gardens (Amherst 1896; and see Meyvaert 1986). Evidence for other gardens with ecclesiastical connections is also found. For example, flowers and trees are known to have been grown specifically for church ceremonies. There was a sacrist’s garden close to the Saxon cathedral at Winchester, which John Harvey suggests may have been on the same site as a garden that had been known for centuries as “paradise” (Harvey 1981, 34). These gardens, gardini sacristae, were under the care of the sacristan and, as such, were designed so that they could provide—for example, in the case of a piece of land left to Eton College by Henry VI—“certaine trees and flowers behovable and convenient for the service of the same church” (Amherst 1896, 17). More recent studies have explored the development of medieval parks and gardens and their link to social status, most extensively that of the counts of Artois at Hesdin (Truitt 2015; Farmer 2013; Dowling 2012; Van Buren 1986). This estate is considered in more detail later.

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Alongside definitions of garden spaces by type, there has been considerable debate over whether the written evidence is trustworthy regarding what plants were actually grown (Opsomer-Halleux 1986; Mäkinen 2006; Leslie and Hunt 2016). Opsomer-Halleux (1986, 103) has argued that, from the evidence of the plants listed in the Circa instans, a twelfth-century Salernitan text containing over 200 herbal simples, “garden plants played a minor role in the materia medica reflected by herbals,” as “less than onefifth of the gardenplants listed in this work are actually from the garden: most of them cited in this work were wild or exotic.” Stannard (1986, 71) notes the striking “correspondence between the indigenous plant species known in the late Roman West and those in the Middle Ages.” Among the plants to be found in the patrician garden of the more prosperous householders, however, Stannard posits that four, “the columbine, rose, lily, and violet,” were primarily there to serve as “ornamental species.” In doing so he discounts their healing potential as he argues that these were “deliberately planted, carefully maintained, and protected primarily for aesthetic reasons” (Stannard 1986, 77). And, while he acknowledges that the plants grown in pleasure gardens were put to a variety of uses, he nevertheless contends that plants such as these did not warrant to be part of his discussion as being useful for either food or medicine. In this chapter I revisit this rigid categorization of plants and gardens. Using vernacular texts produced in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries and dealing with medicine and healing, I show that plants that were grown for their aesthetic and sensual aspects also provided materia medica and that their curative value went further by contributing to a healing space set within the landscape. Focusing on three specific plants, the lily, the rose, and the “wild” strawberry, I argue that as gardens were developed and cultivated, they, and their aesthetic plants, were readily considered and exploited for their fundamental role in the battle against disease and ill health. Moreover, their “pleasurable” aspects—scent and color—were also valued for their healing properties as much as for their more traditional, well-known use in topical or internal medicine. The production of vernacular advisory manuscripts gained momentum at the end of the twelfth century, and by the thirteenth century a wide range of “how-to” literature became available to a wider audience (Hunt 1990; Green 2008; Wogan-Browne 2009). The advice given ranged from devotional texts to romance literature, husbandries, and medical works. Texts such as these were often combined to form a useful household compilation, for example, in the early fourteenth-century English manuscript MS London, British Library Harley 273, which contains a variety of texts, all in French but not all religious; one concerns a husbandry that advises how a lord or lady should manage his or her estates; another gives rules for ensuring love and friendship, all of which suggest that the book may have been owned by a wealthy layperson rather than a cleric. To advice literature such as this were added regimes of health, for example Aldobrandino de Siena’s

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popular handbook, where the emphasis was on personal diet and lifestyle and shows an awareness of the effect on disease caused by emotive responses such as anger, fear, sadness, and shame (MacLehose 2008). As with other medical knowledge available to later medieval compilers of advice literature this popular and widely disseminated late thirteenth-century text—the Livre de physicke later known as the Régime du corps—incorporated knowledge that was transmitted from antiquity (Landozy and Pepin 1911). Following another medical theory from antiquity, the Galenic tradition taught that therapies should be used to encourage nature’s role in the healing process, and religion and medicine combined to cure body and soul (Yoshikawa 2015; Langum 2016). These texts were intended to help their readers prevent illness and took into account not only age and gender but also the environment to ensure that health was promoted and maintained. Examples of the medical knowledge that recognized a plant’s ability to both nourish and heal are found in many vernacular manuscripts of medicine in the medieval period. From the margins of manuscripts where they are used to embellish the text to medicinal remedies to purify and embellish the skin and perfume the air, the presence of roses, lilies, and strawberries is ubiquitous. This was a time when it was believed that illness was largely the result of an imbalance in the body’s humors, and balancing these to ensure health was at the root of healing practices. (Dendle and Touwaide 2008; Scully 2008; Getz 1998; Hunt 1997, 1994). However, alongside other therapies, a multitude of plants and other materia medica were also widely prescribed to deal with everyday matters of healing. Toward the end of the thirteenth century, such medical advice extended not only to using plants but also to designing and maintaining spaces they were grown in. The later medieval writer Albertus Magnus (1206–1280) studied how, when designing gardens, nature could be harnessed to positively influence health. In his study of the plant kingdom, De vegetabilibus et plantis (ca. 1260), he provides an alphabetical list of plants along with instructions on how to lay out a small enclosed garden, or herber. These typically contained flowers, aromatic plants, and trees, the combination of which not only provided the plants required for materia medica but also participated in creating a perfect healing space. Albertus recommends that the lawn at the center of this enclosed garden should be surrounded by borders and that these should be planted with a variety of sweet-smelling herbs. These include a number of the plants that Harvey had dismissed as being of mere aesthetic value such as “violets, columbine, lilies, roses and gladioli.” Studendum est autem ut caespis tantare sit mesurae, ut post caespitem per quadratum in circuitu omnis generis aromaticae herbae, sicut ruta et salvia et basilicon, plantentur, et similiter omnis generis flores, sicut viola, aquilea, lilium, rosa, gladiolus et his similia. (Meyer and Jessen 1867, 637)

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Care must be taken that the lawn is of such a size that about it in a square may be planted every sweet-smelling herbs such as rue and sage and basil, and likewise all sorts of flowers, as the violet, columbine, lily, rose, iris and the like. Cum quo reficiendi sunt sensus et homines insideant ad delectabilitur quiescendum. (Meyer and Jessen 1867, 637) So that men may sit down there to take repose and delightfully restore their senses. To allow time to be spent comfortably in this space, he advises that it should also be furnished with sedilia (turf benches) to sit on. Albertus also advocated the use of plants not only for their medicinal use but also for the value of their form and color: Post caespitem vero sit magna herbarum medicinalium et aromaticarum diversitas ut non tantummodo delectet ex ordone secundum olfactum sed et flores diversitate reficiant visum, et ipsa multimoda sui diversitate in admirationem trahant se aspicientes. (Meyer and Jessen 1867, 637) Behind the lawn it would be right to have a garden with a great diversity of medicinal and aromatic herbs, not only to delight the sense of smell by their perfume but to restore the sight with the variety of their flowers, and to draw wonder from their many forms by those who gaze upon them. This well-known description, of an idyllic garden, is often incorporated into surviving copies of a widely disseminated text that borrows heavily from Albertus Magnus and was later translated into French but by the fifteenth century was to be found in royal and aristocratic households on both sides of the Channel (Calkins, 162). Albertus’s chapter on creating a multisensory garden replete with medicinal herbs formed the basis of book VIII of Italian author Pietro de’ Crescenzi’s Liber ruralium commodorum (Calkins 1986). This useful handbook also provided a “how-to” manual, and retained the focus on the pleasure to be had from spending therapeutic time in the garden. The text is often supplemented with depictions of trellises that are shown supporting grape vines and climbing roses. Further images of the garden can be found in manuscripts that illustrate a variety of texts including those of romance literature and devotional works (a well-known example is Emelye’s garden in the fifteenth-century manuscript MS Vienna [Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex 2617]). However, these polysemic images of roses, turf benches and flowery meads, with the capacity to evoke memories of time spent in a garden along with its potential for healing through its

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materia medica, reveal contemporary knowledge of the plants’ use in healing, which may today be hidden from view. Albertus Magnus’s description of the essential planting elements of any garden, medicinal and aromatic, underlines how even pleasure gardens could be the source for a variety of healing plants.

Roses One of the earliest herbals written in Old French and composed in poetic meter throughout dates to the second half of the thirteenth century. In this herbal the rose is said to be valued above all others as not only does it provide delight for the senses but it also has the capacity of healing on a more practical level: La rose si est des flors la flor por sa biaute e por s’odor. Uncor vaut mieuz por ses valors, Quar el fait a meint mal secors. (Hunt 2008, 81) The rose is the flower above all flowers for its beauty and its perfume. Still better her good qualities because she gives aid to many who suffer. The widespread cultivation of roses on both sides of the Channel, and the many uses to which they were put, is also evident in the practice of weaving chapelets, garlands, and wreaths from roses. These were sometimes given as nominal rent in land tenure transactions. For example the Inquisitions Post Mortem during the reign of Edward I record in 1299 “a carucate of land [in Dorset] . . . held in free marriage with Joan his wife, of the gift of Andrew Wake, to hold of him and his heirs by service of a garland (unius garlandach) of roses yearly” (Sharp and Stamp 1912, 416–422). Their relatively fleeting appearance in high summer and the risk of their loss through bad weather suggest that roses grown in large quantities were used for more than their aesthetic appeal. One medieval account is given by the records of Henry de Lacy, the Earl of Lincoln. His records show that he was profiting from the sale of roses (cited in Amherst 1896, 38). John Harvey notes that roses were being grown at Le Houlme near Rouen for which a tithe was paid. He adds that “presumably they were used for medicinal use and for making rose-water” but provides no detail (Harvey 1981, 75). The roses in this period would likely have been the Gallica rose, whose perfume is enhanced when dried, that had been brought to Provence from its native Phoenicia by the crusading Count Thibault (Theobald of Champagne and Brie, king of Navarre, 1201–1253) in the early thirteenth century (McLean 2014 [1981], 168). This rose, the Rose of Provins, Gallica officinalis, was adopted by Edmund of Woodstock, youngest son of Edward I, as his emblem after an embassy to Provence in 1320.

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By far the most extensive evidence of rose cultivation comes not from England but from the records of Hesdin, mentioned earlier. In 1307 Mahaut of Artois transferred roses from her park at Hesdin to another of her domains at Tourneham. She also bought roses and raspberries from one of the richest bourgeois in Saint-Omer. A quantity of these she had sent to her châteaux at la Montoire and d’Eperlecques (Richard 1888, 413). Mahaut’s love of roses is evident from these records, but, although Richard makes no reference to their use, I suggest that her delight in growing roses goes beyond aesthetics to knowing the practical uses to which the flowers could be used in food and medicine (Richard 1892, 413). In 1324 she arranged for four hundred rose bushes to be purchased from Pieron Prier, a large quantity by any standard. These were intended for the enclosed garden (courtil) of her hospital at Hesdin (Richard 1892, 414). The roses from four hundred well cared for and nurtured plants would have provided prodigious quantities of petals for use. The roses would have been carefully dried and stored to enable their color, perfume, and taste to last beyond the summer season. Evidence of the production of rosewater on Mahaut’s estates is given in the accounts for 1331, where an item is shown that records the cost of constructing a hanging vessel for making rosewater (une cloke a yawe rose et on li trouver plonc a se faire, 11s; Richard 1887a, 5). The origins of the word cloke are unknown: the medieval French dictionary equates it with cloche, a hanging seal. Although this could equally be a “seal that hangs made from lead” the fact that it is given for making rosewater leads me to believe it is intended to be similar to that which appears in the Livre de seyntz medicines, composed in England, which also gives instructions for making rosewater in what appears to be a container in the shape of a helmet (Arnould 1940, 151). Rose oil, rose sugar, and powdered roses are all cited in medical collections. For instance, a vernacular medical text, translated from Latin and written around 1300 not far from Hesdin, calls for the use of powdered rose petals and beans to treat excoriated skin: Si le cuirs est escorchiés, fai pourre de roses et de feves seces et met desus. (Södergård 1980, 55) Citing Ysaac the translator gives a remedy to help someone recover from a debilitating contagious disease (vairole): Se il a foire, done li zucaran rosat or trocisco de spodio, rasura eboris, sandal, roses destemprees en eue rose. (Södergård 1980, 56) If he is cold, give him rose sugar or tablets of burnt ivory, fine ivory shavings, sandal (resinous aromatic from sandalwood) stirred together with rosewater.

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Coincidentally, Edmund of Woodstock visited Countess Mahaut of Artois at her Paris town house in 1324, the same year as her purchase of roses (Richard 1887b, 75). It would be tempting to suggest that gardening on a grand scale was a pastime that brought together elite men and women both sides of the Channel. The evidence at present, however, suggests that the English also incorporated roses into cookery at an early date: thirteenthcentury culinary recipes written in Anglo-Norman were already including roses among their ingredients (Hieatt and Jones 1986, 864; McLean 2014 [1981], 238). The final appearance of the dish was also of importance as seen through the instructions that are given calling for additional fresh rose petals and rose sugar, made with white sugar and rosewater, to be added to the dish before taking it to the table.

Lilies The author of the Old French herbal mentioned earlier (Hunt 2008), which was an adapted version of a Latin herbal, also added some additional personal advice on the use of lily leaves as, alongside the usual use in skin care such as removing wrinkles, it advises that both the leaves and the bulb can be used to purge inflammations and hard abscesses (ibid., 83). The use of lilies in medicine is also closely associated with the symbolic ideal of purity and whiteness. This ideal is emulated in remedies that were intended to cleanse or whiten the complexion. Two manuscripts that emanate from the same linguistic area of Northern France as Hesdin contain a copy of a well-known text on women’s medicine, the Liber de sinthomatibus mulierum, which also cites lilies (Tyers 2012, 162–222). One of the remedies is a medical fumigation which was intended to help female fertility by provoking menstruation, referred to widely in vernacular texts as the flowers, and thereby cleanse the female body enabling the woman to conceive. However, a curious change has taken place in the transmission of this recipe as in these two related manuscripts the usual edible ginger has been replaced by lily leaves. This notable difference between the two texts points to this compiler’s awareness of the cultural connection of lilies and purity, either in its use in for removing unwanted discoloration of the complexion, or, indeed, wrinkles (Hunt 2008, 83), or in cleansing the body of the menses, which was considered, in some circles, to be a noxious substance (Green 2005, 51–64). Apart from their use as a symbol of purity and as a practical means to embellish the complexion lilies are also recorded as being used to decorate food. For example, along with a variety of other perfumed plants their flowers were used in both cooking and as a garnish where they appear in recipes along with other fragrant flowers such as the clove-scented gillyflowers (pinks), sweet violets, scarlet paeonies, delicate primroses, and aromatic, slightly peppery lavender (Adamson 2004, 103). Other manuscripts that are known to have been produced in Picardy record recipes for making a wide range of medicinal waters including lily

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v

water. One (MS Kassel fol. 324 ) gives detailed instructions and drawings of both how to make the medicinal waters and how to construct the necessary alembic, and the evidence for the use of European water lilies dates back to the earliest times. According to ancient authorities such as Dioscorides water lilies had valuable medicinal properties, Guy de Chauliac (1300–1368) notes that the only useful part of the water lily was the flower, which he considered to be “soporific” and a “pain-killer” (McVaugh and Ogden 1997, 407). Its use in England is attested in a manuscript executed in England at the beginning of the fourteenth century. (MS Stowe 948) Along with a number of devotional poems in Anglo-Norman there is a simple collection of vernacular remedies that includes instructions in a compound medicinal remedy for the liver that calls for the addition of half an ounce of flurs de ninifar—the flowers of water lilies (Hunt 1990, 71).

“Wild” Strawberries One manuscript compilation that contains a number of late thirteenthcentury and fourteenth-century texts contains a variety of medical material written in Latin and Anglo-Norman, along with a trilingual glossary (ff.69v–72v) that continues in Latin and English. Along with this glossary the number of English glosses, suggest that at least parts of this manuscript circulated in England as early as the fourteenth century. One of the sections is a text that records the names of plants which were cultivated in gardens or could have been collected in the wild. “Listen well to what I have heard said . . . ,” writes the compiler of the medicinal remedies, in verse: Pernez violette, frasere, cerlange, endivie, cycoree, cupere /.i. liverwort, medene(c)her, roses, la rasine de fenoil et de percil e liquoriz e le quisez en ewe. Et si il ne soit mie le chaut mal, metez un poi de ysope. (BL MS Sloane 146; cited in Hunt 1990, 273) Take violets, woodland strawberries, hart’s tongue ferm, endive, chicory, cupere that is liverwort, maidenhair fern, roses, the root of fennel and of parsley and liquorice and cook these in water. And if there may be very little temperature (chaud mal) add a little hyssop. This particular remedy, also intended to treat a hot liver, calls for a range of cooling botanicals that were also used as food and that thrive in cooler areas. Both roses and woodland strawberries are cited as part of this remedy and are of particular interest as they are both food and medicine. The geography of the “earthly paradise” of the park at Hesdin, a description also applied to Henry I’s palace at Woodstock in England (Prest 1988, 22), allowed ample opportunity for edible wild plants, such as wild strawberries and roses to colonize the hedgerows and banks of the medieval landscape (Van Buren 1986, 130). Élise Gesbert has also noted how planting in

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medieval gardens was eclectic and how plants and flowers from the wild, such as those that would have grown on the banks and in the undergrowth (sous-bois) and alongside the paths and walkways down to the marshes in Mahaut’s landscape, would have been allowed to colonize even the pleasure gardens (2003, 405). How “wild,” then, were the wild strawberries? Wild strawberries (Fragaria vesca) are known to have been consumed in Roman Britain (Potter and Johns 1992, 60). In antiquity wild strawberries grew in Italy and on some Greek mountainsides. St. Augustine (354–430)— born in present-day Algeria in a Roman province—describes the experience and wonder of a “previously unimagined perception”: As small children living inland we could imagine the sight of the sea from water in a cup, whereas the taste of strawberries or cherries, before we tried them in Italy, never occurred to us. (quoted in translation by Bockmuehl 1991, 9) Mahaut also chose to grow fragrant wild strawberries in large quantities in her northern gardens. The estate documents for the hospital describe an ingenious method, a mound (monticule) with terraces, which was used to grow enough strawberries to answer the needs of both the kitchen and medicine (Richard 1892, 414). This system would have capitalized on the plant’s method of self-setting by allowing the prolific runners to put down their roots in the terrace below and thereby increasing the stock over time. For their size, wild strawberries have an intense and perfumed flavor, and there is something in their appearance with their white flowers combined with red fruit that can compel passersby to pick and eat the tiny but fragrant berries. Strawberries quickly became a favored plant. Three decades later, in 1368, Charles V’s gardener, Jean Dudoy, planted no less than twelve thousand plants in the royal gardens of the Louvre in Paris, while over at the Château de Rouvres, near Dijon, strawberry cultivation had increased to such an extent that a few years later in 1375 the duchess commented that they “now covered all four quartiers of her garden” (Darrow 1966, 447). In 1321 in the gardens of the Château of Hesdin, a number of violets, strawberries, and raspberries were pulled out and transplanted into the meadows below the gloriette. From the records it appears that this mound had been neglected as before planting the strawberries it was necessary that it was cleared of invasive weeds such as briar (Richard 1892, 414). The accounts show that day work and seasonal work (journaliers) were often carried out by women. They would be employed to not only collect fruit and hoe the vegetables and roses but also to bring the manure into the gardens to nourish the roses. They also carried out the task of trimming and training the vines and roses on their trellises (Richard 1892, 415). However, apart from their delightful appearance and perfumed taste, they also have another practical use in medicine. In a medical collection that emanates from the same area of northern France, compiled around

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1300, strawberry leaves are cited as an ingredient in an ointment used to heal abscesses or pustulant swellings (Södergård 1980, 18). In another collection, which is, according to Hunt, one of the earliest and most important collections of vernacular medical texts, the compiler gives a simple remedy to treat eyes that are affected by rheum (matter in the eyes) or redness or are painful: Prenez freses en tens d’esté, Et bon miel chaut et escumé, Ensemble les devez meller, La goute en devés puis coler. Icele goute es euz metez, Si avra beus euz et cliers assés. (Cambridge, Cambridge Trinity College, MS O.1.20 f. 3va, cited in Hunt 1990, 196) Take strawberries in summer time and good honey, hot and skimmed. These you should mix together, and then the juice you must strain. Put this juice into your eyes, and they will be beautiful and clear enough. There remains a question of whether this manuscript was produced in England, but given the close ties of later medieval families who owned lands both sides of the Channel, and the main scribe being “certainly Anglo-Norman” (Hunt 1990 , 142), there is adequate evidence of both garden and medicinal knowledge having its roots in both England and northwestern France. Remedies such as these are simple demonstrations of how easily wild plants that were subsequently cultivated in large quantities provided a source of healing from medieval pleasure gardens.

A Trio of Delights for the Senses? Recipes for making salves are prescribed that use two or three plants or even over thirty and instructions include how to store them away for when they are needed; for example, a compound syrup laxative cited in a late thirteenth-century compendium calls for the use of violets and roses (Hunt 1990, 107). Beyond their use as topical and ingestible ingredients, however, the therapeutic value of the fragrance of plants is well evidenced in the medical texts. For example, a more formal collection of treatments, dating from the fourteenth century, suggests an inhalation made up of roses, violets, water lilies, camphor, and sandalwood to treat pains in the head, which were thought to have been caused by an imbalance in the humors. This aromatic inhalation was then followed up by washing the head with a decoction of fresh roses and water lily flowers with rosewater being applied to the nostrils: A dolur de la teste ke avient de fume de souffre: fetes le patient odorer sovent roses, violes e flur de nenufar e camphre e sandles [f.82v] e lavét

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Their potential to soothe mental suffering was also recognized. A treatment for melancholy in the same manuscript prescribes a warm bath before eating a light meal consisting of birds and other white meat. After the bath a concoction of the fragrant flowers of “nenuphar [water lilies], camomile, roses e violette” should be poured over the head of the patient to complete the treatment (Hunt 1997, 142). Fragrant remedies such as these were intended to reorder and balance the body, and while they purified, restored, and reinvigorated the patient, they would be reminded of the garden. These treatments were aimed at alleviating pain and providing comfort and could have helped in both physical and psychological illness (Le Guérer 1993). Returning to Mahaut’s purchase of roses for her hospital, we cannot discount that their purpose was to provide a form of aromatherapy. The courtil being an enclosed space would have captured the delicate perfume of the roses as they fleetingly appeared in the warmth of midsummer. A deed records the design of the hospital of Saint-Jean en-l’Estrée d’Arras and how “the sick were sometimes laid on cushions near the open windows to allow them access to the fresh air” (Kemp-Welch 1913, 102). In high summer, the air would have been filled with the perfume of roses along with that of other scented flowers such as lilies and a particular variety of sage, which is known to have been cultivated in the hospital gardens and is referred to in medical manuscripts as saillee or sauge nostre (Richard 1892, 414).

Conclusion Recent studies have shown how although our lives may be dominated by our visual sense, smells and perfumes trigger much deeper emotional responses and that these emotional responses can be harnessed to promote healing (Sternberg 2009). Researchers are now discovering how the visual and sensory appeal of gardens goes beyond the plants’ capacity to appeal to the senses for mere gratification but become an essential part of the healing experience (James et al., 2015; and see the chapter by Jones in this volume). The evidence for the production of rosewater or oil for medicinal use, rosescented sugar, and roses used in recipes, concocted from the fleeting flowers that only appeared in high summer, demonstrates how plants grown in the pleasure gardens of medieval Europe provided more than what Stannard (1986, 77) described as “sensual gratification.” From the evidence of medical texts and recipe and remedy collections, the harvesting and storing of aromatic plants and flowers for their use in medicine or cosmetics were an essential part of gardening activity in the Middle Ages. Taken together records such as those examined here allow us to draw conclusions of the inherent value to their owners of the landscape and vegetation of the areas

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in which they lived. Drawing together the strands of evidence from estate records and collections of remedies it can be demonstrated how highly valued the natural world was to health and well-being. Medieval interest in the landscape, in gardening and in the production of vernacular texts, is a reflection of the ancient tradition of collecting and using plants for both food and to heal. The investment in gardens ostensibly for pleasure, but incorporating fragrant species and cultivars of woodland varieties, demonstrates that roses and other perfumed plants, aside from their sensual gratification provided a source of essential materia medica. It is evidence of an agelong endeavor to provide a holistic environment to foster health and well-being.

Bibliography Adamson, Melitta Weiss, 2004. Food in Medieval Times. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press. Alberti Magni, 1867. Ex Ordine Praedicatorum, De Vegetabilibus Libri VII, Historiae Naturalis, Pars XVIII, Editionem Criticam, Meyer and Jessen, Berolini, 637. Amherst, Alicia, 1896. A History of Gardening in England. 2nd ed. London: Bernard Quaritch. Arnould, E. J., ed., 1940. Henry of Lancaster, Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines. Oxford: Anglo-Norman Text Society. Bockmuehl, Marcus, 1991. “Strawberries the Food of Paradise: A Study in Christian Symbolism.” Crux 27.3: 9–21. Calkins, Robert G., 1986. “Piero de’ Crescenzi and the Medieval Garden.” In Medieval Gardens, edited by Elizabeth MacDougall, 157–173. Washington: Dumbarton Oaks. Darrow, G., 1966. The Strawberry: History, Breeding and Physiology. New York and Chicago: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. de Lincy, Antoine le Roux, 1852. “Inventaires des biens meubles et immeubles de la comtesse Mahaut d’Artois, pillés par l’armée de son neveu, en 1313.” Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes 13: 53–79. Dendle, Peter, and Alain Touwaide, eds., 2008. Health and Healing from the Medieval Garden. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. Dowling, Abigail P., 2012. “Landscape of Luxuries: Mahaut D’Artois’s (1302–1329) Management and Use of the Park at Hesdin.” In Rural Space in the Middle Ages and Early-Modern Age, edited by Albrecht Classen, 367–388. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Dyer, Christopher, 2000. Everyday Life in Medieval England. London: Hambledon and London. Farmer, Sharon, 2013. “Aristocratic Power and the ‘Natural’ Landscape: The Garden Park at Hesdin, ca. 1291–1302.” Speculum 88.3: 664–679. Gesbert, Élise, 2003. “Les jardins au Moyen Âge: du XIe au début du XIVe siècle.” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 46.184: 381–408. Getz, Faye, 1998. Medicine in the English Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Green, M. H., 2005. “Flowers, Poisons, and Men: Menstruation in Medieval Western Europe.” In Menstruation: A Cultural History, edited by A. Shail and G. Howie, 51–64. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Green, M. H., 2008. Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynecology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Guigonis de Caulhiaco (Guy de Chauliac), 1997. Inventarium Sive Chirurgia Magna, Volume 2 Commentary, eds. Michael R. McVaugh and Margaret S. Ogden. Leiden: Brill. Harvey, John, 1981. Medieval Gardens. London: Batsford. Hawkins, Joy, 2014. “Sights for Sore Eyes: Vision and Health in Medieval England.” In On Light, edited by Kenneth P. Clarke and Sarah Baccianti, 137–156. Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literatures. Hieatt, Constance B., and Robin F. Jones, 1986. “Two Anglo-Norman Culinary Collections Edited from British Library Manuscripts Additional 3285 and Royal 12.C.xii.” Speculum 61.4: 859–882. Hunt, Tony, 1990. Popular Medicine in Thirteenth-Century England: Introduction and Texts. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Hunt, Tony, 1994. Anglo-Norman Medicine 1: Roger Frugard’s “Chirurgia” and the “Practica Brevis of Platearius. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Hunt, Tony, 1997. Anglo-Norman Medicine: II Shorter Treatises. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Hunt, Tony, 2008. An Old French Herbal (Princeton Garrett 131). Turnhout: Brepols. James, P., et al., 2015. “A Review of the Health Benefits of Greenness.” Current Epidemiology Reports 2.2: 131–142. Kemp-Welch, Alice, 1913. Of Six Mediaeval Women: To Which Is Added a Note on Medieval Gardens. London: Macmillan. Landozy, Louis, and Roger Pepin, eds., 1911. Régime du corps: Maitre Aldebrandin de Sienne Texte Français di Xiiie siècle. Paris: Champion. Langum, Virginia, 2016. Medicine and the Seven Deadly Sins in Late Medieval Literature and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Le Guérer, Annick, 1993. Scent: The Mysterious and Essential Powers of Perfume, trans. Richard Miller. London: Chatto and Windus. Leslie, Michael, and John Dixon Hunt, 2016. A Cultural History of Gardens. Vols. 1–6. London: Bloomsbury Academic. MacLehose, William F., 2008. “A Tender Age”: Cultural Anxieties over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. New York: Columbia University Press. Mäkinen, M., 2006. “Between Herbals et Alia: Intertextuality in Medieval English Herbals.” Unpublished PhD Thesis, Helsinki University, Helsinki, Finland. McLean, Teresa, 2014 [1981]. Medieval English Gardens. New York: Dover Publications. Meyvaert, Paul, 1986. “The Medieval Monastic Garden.” In Medieval Gardens, edited by Elisabeth B. MacDougall, 23–54. Washington: Dumbarton Oaks. Opsomer-Halleux, Carmélia, 1986. “The Medieval Garden and Its Role in Medicine.” In Medieval Gardens, edited by Elisabeth B. MacDougall, 95–113. Washington: Dumbarton Oaks. Potter, T. W., and Catherine Johns, 1992. Roman Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press. Prest, John, 1988. Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Recreation of Paradise. New Haven: Yale University Press. Richard, J.-M., 1887a. Inventaires sommaires des archives départementales antérieurs a 1790: Archives Civiles, Tome Deuxième, Série A, A504–A1013. Arras: Archives départementales. Richard, J.-M., 1887b. Une petite-nièce de saint Louis: Mahaut Comtesse d’Artois et de Bourgogne. Paris: H. Champion. Richard, J.-M., ed., 1888. Cartulaire de l’hôpital Saint-Jean-en-l’Estrée d’Arras publié avec d’autres documents et une étude sur le régime intérieur de cette maison et des hôpitaux d’Hesdin et Gosnay dans la première moitié du XIVe siècle. Paris: H. Champion.

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Richard, J.-M., 1892. “Thierry D’Hiercon, (1300-1328: Premier Article).” Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes 53: 383–416. Scully, Terence, 2008. “A Cook’s Therapeutic Use of Garden Herbs.” In Health and Healing from the Medieval Garden, edited by Peter Dendle and Alain Touwaide, 60–71. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. Sharp, J. E. E. S., and A. E. Stamp, eds., 1912. Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem: Volume 3, Edward I. London: HMSO. www.british-history.ac.uk/ inquis-post-mortem/vol3 Södergård, Östen, ed., 1980. La Chirurgie de l’Abbé Poutrel: Texte Picard de 1300 Environ. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. Stannard, Jerry, 1986. “Alimentary and Medicinal Use of Plants.” In Medieval Gardens, edited by Elisabeth B. MacDougall, 71–91. Washington: Dumbarton Oaks. Sternberg, Esther M., M.D., 2009. Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and WellBeing. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Thompson, Aniel V., 1956. The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting. New York: Dover Publications. Truitt, Elly R., 2015. Medieval Robots, Mechanism, Magic, Nature and Art. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Tyers, Theresa L., 2012. “The Rebirth of Fertility: The Trotula and Her Travelling Companions c. 1200–1400.” Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Nottingham, Nottingham. Van Buren, Anne Hagopian, 1986. “Reality and Literary Romance in the Park of Hesdin.” In Medieval Gardens, edited by Elisabeth B. MacDougall, 117–134. Washington: Dumbarton Oaks. Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, ed. 2009. Language and Culture in Medieval England: The French of England, c.1100-c.1500. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer for the York Medieval Press. Yoshikawa, Naoë Kukita, ed., 2015. Medicine, Religion and Gender in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.

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In Dock, Out Nettle Negotiating Health Risks in the Early Modern Garden Emily Cock

Gardens played a crucial role in the health of early modern people. Beyond the provision of vegetables and other foods, most medicines prior to the eighteenth century were ultimately derived from plant or animal materials. Moreover, being in a garden or pastoral space was praised for its curative effects by poets and medical writers alike as in and of itself conducive to health. The agricultural reforms in England that followed the drought conditions of the 1590s and corresponding food shortages included the development of fruit orchards and productive and pleasurable home gardens that were supposed to prevent later deprivations (Tigner 2012, 5–6). After the tumult of the Civil War, writers such as John Evelyn, John Milton, and Abraham Cowley focused on the garden as prelapsarian, blending futurism with nostalgia for a prewar period wherein the garden provided a key to a restored England and a reprieve from the unpleasantnesses of the uncontrolled outside world (Hodgson 2015, 48; Tigner 2012, 7). The first generation of printed garden manuals by Thomas Hill, William Lawson, and others encouraged and guided readers in how to design, manage, and enjoy ideal gardens of native and imported plants. But the garden was not without dangers. Pest species of animals and plants, the scorching sun, and a myriad of other factors complicated the gap between an idyllic new Eden and the muddy, weedy, labor-intensive reality of a garden (Bartos 2010). The garden manuals therefore taught their readers how to manage these complications in order to maximize the health benefits of the garden space. The enclosure of a garden performed significant work toward this through protecting the space, its people, and its fauna and flora, but it was not in and of itself sufficient and could itself pose risks— dangerous brambles and thorns or a hiding place for malefactors. Within the barrier, the garden had to be styled, managed, and maintained in a way that would best aid the health of those within it. Recognizing and managing risks were thus important gardening duties. This chapter explores how early modern gardeners identified, managed, and eliminated hazards to health in the enclosed garden. Bernardo Ramazzini (1633–1714) is credited with instigating the field of occupational medicine through his De morbis artificum diatriba (On the Diseases of Workers), first

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published in 1700 and rapidly transmitted and translated across Europe. Prior to Ramazzini’s book, however, some medical writers do demonstrate an awareness of the impact of different occupations and labor on health, and this chapter contributes to this prehistory of occupational medicine. Early printed garden manuals were predominantly targeted at the lower gentry and merchant families most likely to benefit from enclosure movements and are thus particularly effusive in their praise for enclosed gardens (Munroe 2008, 18). Other writers, such as Samuel Hartlib, criticized the effects of enclosure on rural populations while emphasizing the redemptive possibilities of improving the post-Fall landscape through hard work (Bartos 2010, 185). Some readers would have employed their own professional gardeners, while others would have performed most of the tasks themselves as part of the household economy, or for pleasure. In modern occupational health and safety planning, risk prevention generally incorporates four key aspects: hazard elimination, engineering controls (changes to workspace and equipment), administrative controls (changes to processes and training), and personal protective equipment (Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety 1997–2017). The early modern garden manuals examined here engage with each of these techniques. While the majority of their recommendations are intended for the person ultimately performing the labor in the garden, others are for the benefit of the landowner or any visitors. All aim to increase the garden’s capacity for health in its provision of goods and a beneficial, even curative space.

Enclosure Enclosing gardens and garden beds with trees, fences, or hedges not only protected the plants but also sheltered the gardener from the sun, snow, wind, and rain. Enclosed gardens could also provide privacy and protection from passersby and security for belongings and animals. It is a top priority for Thomas Hill, whose book went through multiple editions from 1577 to 1660. Hill followed his opening discussion of how to choose the location for a garden by stressing that it would be “a meere madnesse” to go to such trouble and then leave it open “to the injuries to be wrought & done by robbers or theeves, foules and beastes” (Hill 1577, sig. B2r). After discussing walling systems used in Roman and older English gardens, Hill ultimately recommends “a naturall and strong Hedge” of brambles and white thorn that, rather than requiring rebuilding and high maintenance each year, can be cultivated cheaply from seed and will grow naturally stronger of its own accord (ibid., sig. B3r). Furthermore, through burning back the hedge each year, “as the skilfull Husband men affirme, they shoote out harder and rougher of prickles” and “in a fewe yeares with diligence cut, waxeth so thicke and strong, that hardly any person can enter into the ground, saving by the Garden dore” (ibid., sigs B4r–v). William Lawson adds that vigilance is required not only for maintenance, but for changing conditions of the

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year, since in Winter “driftes of snow will let Deere, Hares, and Conies, and other noysome beasts over your walles and hedges” (Lawson 1618, sig. B1v). Lawson’s instructions for fencing a private orchard verge on paranoia in his distrust of neighbors’ honesty and industry: For you can possesse no goods, that have so many enemyes as an Orchard. . . . Fruits are so delightsome, and desired of so many, (nay, in a manner of all) and yet few will be at cost and take paines to provide them. Fence well therefore, let your plot be wholy in your own power, that you make all your fence your self: for Neighbours fencing is none at all, or very carelesse. Take heede of a doore or window, (yea of a wall) of any other mans into your Orchard: yea, though it be naild up, or the Wall be high, for perhaps they will proove theeves. (ibid., sig. C3r) John Evelyn, not to be outdone, settles on a “good, strong and substantiall Wall of two foote in thickness, and thirteene foote in height, either of brick, stone, or such materialls as may neither decay, nor leave any uneven & rugged surfaces, receptacles for Snailes, and other noxious Insects” (Evelyn 2001, 95). The enclosing materials themselves therefore carried risks of thorns, snails, and the owner’s complacency. In the early eighteenth century, the desire to blend enclosure with an uninterrupted view produced the “haha” boundary—a steep ditch with a sunken fence or walled side—that was said to have taken its name from the expression of surprise produced in anyone unfortunate enough to fall into it (Oxford English Dictionary 2016, s.v. ha-ha, n. 2). The metaphorical dangers of such a fall would later be exploited fully by Jane Austen in Mansfield Park (1814). Within literature and the wider cultural imagination, the enclosed garden was simultaneously a place of safety, retreat, and contemplation and a hidden area ripe for seduction, intrigue, and attack. Philip Stubbes wrote scathingly of the privacy offered by garden spaces in The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), and awareness of the dark possibilities of the garden’s seclusion continued (Willes 2011, 133; Crane 2009; Bending 2013). Puritan thinkers also warned against too ostentatious gardens full of purely ornamental foreign flowers as distractions from God and emphasizers of social inequality, advocating more utilitarian plant choices and communal layouts (Munroe 2008, 122). The very devout Lady Margaret Hoby worried that the garden could distract her from her more important spiritual tasks, recording in her diary on April 6, 1605, that “this day I bestowed too much time in the Garden, and thereby was worse able to performe sperituall duties” (quoted in Willes 2011, 130). Such concerns are also evident in Hartlib’s assurance to readers of his own gardening text that it was the combination of good husbandry and God’s blessing that caused plants to flourish, and allowed gardens, vineyards, orchards, and other ventures to grow successfully even where they had never done before (Hartlib 1651, sig. E3v).

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Hill’s emphasis on the importance of barriers is predominantly for the protection of the garden itself and the movable property held within it. In addition to the risk of tearing on hedge thorns, the theft of sheets and clothes left drying on hedges testified to the latter’s position at the border between the private garden and the public thoroughfares by which the thief could make his or her escape. Examples include two cases tried on December 8, 1686, wherein James Wood stole an assortment of linens from the hedge of Thomas Hill and attempted to hide in a hedge farther off, and John Pargiter and Samuel Bomet stole a tablecloth drying on a hedge that belonged to the Reverend Thomas Bishop (Old Bailey Proceedings, London Lives, 1690– 1800, t16861208–38 and t16861208–37). Preventing the entry of “robbers or theeves” also served to prevent perpetrators of crimes against the person, including assault in the course of theft. A woman working alone could be at particular risk of violence. In August 1687, Ann Jones testified that William Locton had assaulted and attempted to rob her as she gathered herbs in her master’s garden in Fulham: the Prisoner came upon her before she was awar and Kick’d her on the Head as she was stooping, then stopped her Mouth full of Stones and Gravel, and striped her of her Gown, and was about to Gag her; but a Gentlemen coming by in the mean time, he fled and left her, as also her Gown in the Hedge, but being pursued he was taken some distance thence in a Field. (Old Bailey Proceedings, London Lives, 1690–1800, t16870831–32) The lack of full enclosure here left Ann open to attack, though it was also the means by which a passing gentleman was able to notice and assist her. In providing guidance on enclosure methods, Lawson also advised that “liberality . . . is the best fence,” and sharing your fruit with neighbors will stop them from stealing it (Lawson 1618, sig. C4r). Lawson’s recommendation of generosity may stem from the social unrest that accompanied the drought conditions and subsequent food shortages of the 1590s, which may certainly have threatened the security of any fruiting garden (Willes 2011, 166). Thefts from gardens and orchards were an ongoing concern and could be dangerous for both parties: on August 30, 1694, the Old Bailey tried two cases in which homeowners had shot individuals attempting to steal apples from their orchards. William Walker, who attested that he had shot Lydia Stockwell “by accident, and that he was very sorry for it,” was indicted and branded for manslaughter; however, Ralph Kemp was acquitted of the death by “misfortune” of Abraham Knight, after testifying that “his Orchard had often had oftentimes been Robbed, and the Night before by three soldiers . . . and that he had been threatned to be kill’d by several Thieves before” (Old Bailey Proceedings, London Lives, 1690–1800, t16940830–33 and t16940830–32). Hartlib, politically a great supporter

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of shared gardens and produce, identified a different risk derived from neighbors’ jealousy when he recounted that a woman “5.miles South of Canterbury” who collected households’ urine to water her meadow found that the grass grew so “wonderfully, that many of her neighbours wondered at it, and were like to accuse her of witch-craft” (Hartlib 1651, sig. G4r, original emphasis).

The Garden and Labor Garden manuals discuss how to maximize the health benefits of the garden by offsetting the necessary problems posed to those working and relaxing in it. Work was seen as healthy and a moral virtue for all men, and the elective labors of gardening allowed upper-class men to raise a sweat without necessarily troubling their class status (Bushnell 2003, 87–91; Straub 2012). Lawson extolled the virtue and pleasure of such work, asking, [W]ho can deny, but the principall end of an Orchard is the honest delight of one wearied with the works of his lawful calling? The very workes of, and in an Orchard and Garden, are better than the ease and rest of and from other laboures. (1618, sig. H4r) John Strype’s praise for Sir Thomas Smith’s “curious and exact” approach to gardening hints at the balance required for elite gardeners, as he includes the pursuit among Sir Thomas’s diverse intellectual interests: he praises him “[e]mploying his own Hands sometimes for his diversion in grafting and planting” and says he has himself seen the knight grafting in his orchard and complaining of unfavorable easterly winds (Strype 1698, sigs P5v–P6r). The poet George Gascoigne described his efforts in the garden in a distinctly physical manner in “The Green Knight’s Farewell to Fancy,” where he speaks of the pleasures derived from being free: To plant straunge countrie fruites, to sow such seedes likewise, To digge & delve for new found rootes, where old might wel suffise: To proyne the water bowes, to picke the mossie trees, (Oh how it pleasd my fansie ones) to kneele upon my knees[.] (1575b, sig. P4r) Gascoigne’s speaking Knight is abjuring his worldly pleasures—including gardening—in order to concentrate on his more serious duties, suggesting that his gardening was a mere frivolous dabbling exercise rather than productive or difficult labor. There was debate over the appropriateness of deriving financial profit from a garden—relevant to those who could afford such a choice—but there was no such ambiguity in the appropriateness of pleasure, health, and respite (Willes 2011, 167).

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While early gardening books reflected the whole-family labor required in subsistence gardening, later texts show an increasingly gendered distribution of labor, with women generally relegated to lighter tasks and lower pay (Munroe 2008, 27, 29; McRae 1996, 148). The shift is apparent in images such as the frontispiece of John Parkinson’s Paradisi in Sole/Paradisus Terrestris (1629), where Adam grafts a fruit tree while Eve performs the less-skilled and safer, knifeless task of tending a flower. In small gardens, Lawson recognizes the housewife reader’s preexisting understanding of “[t]he skill and paines of Weeding the Garden with weeding knives or fingers”; he says that he will therefore refrain from offering guidance yet can’t resist “willing them to take the opportunity after a showre of raine,” when the soil will be softer (1618, sig. M1r). The glorification of “[t]he labouring mens hands, [that] glowe and blister after their dayes worke” also could not be considered appropriate to ladies (Nash 1599, sig. G2v). But women were not necessarily excluded from all manual work in gardens: the 1577–1580 account books of Bess of Hardwick include women working in the gardens for regular wages (though lower than men), whose tasks included not only weeding but also “bearing earth” (Willes 2011, 52–53). The tensions intrinsic to women’s involvement in the garden are also highlighted by Laura Gowing in her reading of an insult thrown by Alice Costadine to a neighbor, Margaret Reed, in 1609. Alice accused Margaret of stealing wine and announced that she is a notorious whore and . . . if I weare a man and had a wife I would gett her in a garden to weed or pull up thistles rather than she should ride into the cuntrie with prentices or kepe boyes company. Gowing points out that Alice’s emphasis on the confinement and “thistly discomfort” of the household garden highlight the “humiliation” possible within restriction to the household and its immediate environs (Gowing 1993, 12). The provision of labor-saving devices and garden layouts was presented as a key means of ensuring that the garden could be used and enjoyed to its best capacity, producing a maximum benefit for all who worked at whatever level within the space. Hartlib called for more horticultural experiments, and a greater sharing of results in publication and in person, considering it a “[d]efficiency. . . . That Gentlemen and Farmers do not meet and communicate secrets in this kind, but keep what they have experimented themselves or known from others, as Sybils leaves, I mean as rare secrets not to be communicated” (1651, sig. P1v, original emphasis; on more ambivalent responses to mechanized gardening in early modern literature, see Sawday 2007). Evelyn wrote at length “[o]f the Instruments belonging to a Gardiner, and their various uses” in his manuscript gardening compendium Elysium Britannicum, or the Royal Gardens, which he compiled and corrected from the 1650s to his death in 1706 (2001, 83). He conceded that this “may

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seeme a low and ignoble Subject,” which Hartlib had also highlighted as a primary reason for a lack of advancement in the field (ibid.; Hartlib 1651, sig. P1r–v). Evelyn also provides a full illustration of each implement (2001, 90–91). The spade was the single most prominent gardener’s tool and was featured symbolically on images of gardeners including Adam when positioned as the “first gardener,” as on the frontispiece of John Parkinson’s Theatrum Botanicum (1640). Evelyn (2001, 84) holds it the most important item in his collection, and stipulates that it must be constructed and fitted so as to be of most use to the wielder: It should be w[r]ought of excellent steele, not brittle, of a competent, not over large Size and concavity: the graft (as of all other tooles) of Ash, well and lightly wrought: of a fittinge poise: for these are particulars of maine concernement both as to handinesse and expedition: But we referr it to your election and experience. He then details a wide range of rakes, forks, levels, knives, trowels, and so on, ideally crafted for specific tasks—even “Rollers, for Gravell Walkes, the best [of which] are made of the hardest Marble, and such as are procured from the ruines of many places in Smyrna” (ibid., 87, original emphasis). “Reachers” were shears fixed on handles up to twenty feet long, with a pulley to open and close the blades, “wonderfully usefull for the clipping of hedges, Arbours, trees and tall palisads, without the trouble of a ladder, and to cutt of the tops of inaccessible twiggs on which the Caterpillars do fasten their webbs” or to reach tall fruit if you set up a basket to catch it at a short distance (ibid.). Lawson, lacking such long-reaching pruning shears, highlights instead the value of a fit-for-purpose ladder, firmly secured at the base, “whereon you may safely and easefully stand to grafte, to dresse, and to gather fruit,” of which he provides an illustration (1618, sig. G1r). Evelyn stipulates that, in addition to being a good fit for the user, bladed tools must be sharp and fit for purpose. Pruning pincers, for example, must be “very sharp and of excellent steele,” and Evelyn includes “[a] good Grind stone, Whetstones, Rubbing stones Files to grind, sharpen, & set the edges of your Instruments withall” in his gardener’s ideal arsenal (2001, 88, 92). A gardener with a more restricted budget might be equipped with tools that were cumbersome or blunt, increasing effort requirements and the risk of injury. This would have been particularly true for those whose instruments were secondhand, which is demonstrated in the wills of professional gardeners and other laboring men. In Suffolk, William Clerk, who listed his profession as a “gardener,” bequeathed all of his “tools, all staves & other shop implements” to his son, Thomas, in 1622, while the yeoman John Plumber specified in his 1638 will that “[t]o sons John and Charles all my gardener’s tools [are] to be equally divided between them” (Allen 1989, no. 383; Evans 1993, no. 365). The poor laborer John Scott of Hawkedon also left his eldest son and daughter 12d each and his other son his tools:

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a hatchet, spade, shovel and scythes (Evans 1987, no. 260, cited in Whittle 2005, 100). We might assume that these men had also passed on guidance in how to use and care for their tools if their sons were to succeed them in their occupations. The layout of the garden also affected the labors of those within it. Hill advised that garden beds should only be as wide as a weeder may be able to reach the middle without stepping on the bed and with sufficient path width for them to “freely weede the one halfe first, and nexte the other halfe left to weede” (1577, sig. C5v). Lawson gives similar advice, suggesting that you should arrange garden beds with divisions, “that you may goe betwixt to weede” and adding that you should arrange taller plants by walls and outer borders, so that you can reach lower plants in the middle, and providing a list of sample plants grouped according to their heights (1618, sig. L1r). Such considerations may have had an underappreciated impact on the layout of formal seventeenth-century gardens. Lawson also stipulated that the size of the garden must be manageable in accordance with the owner’s own or access to paid labor: a garden is more labor-intensive than an orchard, requiring “much Weeding, dressing and removing” and will therefore be smaller, “but notwithstanding I am of opinion, that it were better for England, that we had more Orchards and Gardens, and more large, And therefore we leave the quantitie to every man[’]s ability and will” (ibid., sig. K3r). Hartlib, writing with a more specific leveller agenda, went so far as to berate those men who accumulated large swathes of land only to leave it fallow, where a wider distribution could result in greater productivity (1651, sig. P1v). Plants also required irrigation. Ideally, pumps and troughs might be constructed, although such infrastructure, along with wells and decorative ponds, would have posed a drowning risk, especially for children (Spence 2016, 90–94). Some elite garden owners installed elaborate garden machinery and water features to entertain themselves and their guests. These, as well as the famously expensive landscape entertainments constructed for Queen Elizabeth, such as the Earl of Hertford’s at Elvetham in 1591, represented a political gamble among landowners competing for influence and favor (Tigner 2012, 11–12, 27–29). For their guests, they could also present unanticipated perils. John Worlidge, in his otherwise quite serious gardening manual, describes the possibility of “[a] Statue of a Woman, that at the turning of a private Cock [tap], shall cast Water out her Nipples into the Spectators Faces,” complete with an illustration showing the water squirting directly into the eye of a lady walking as part of a fashionable couple (Worlidge 1677, sig. E3r, image on E2v). Optometric risk aside, the propriety of such an eroticized violence would have carried a serious risk for both the lady and her host. At a more pragmatic level, Hill praises the watering pot that “may on such wise be carried in handsome manner” where required (Hill 1577, sig. G1v). Evelyn similarly recommends that the gardener have access to “[w]atering pots of severall Capacities, some portable,

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others more fixed,” and ideally a “Foixt” watering barrel on wheels or otherwise conveniently carried for a larger capacity (2001, 88). Evelyn’s water cart surmounted the risks caused by open water sources or carting buckets by possessing a pump that allowed water to be directed to the farthest corners or highest trees in the garden and can be left as a sprinkler without need for the gardener to remain: It is hardly imaginable, how effectuall, easie, expeditious and naturall this watering, resembling Raine, is, for being directed at the farther part of a Bed or Garden and the Spout fixed to a poynt, it will (without any further attendance) according as the aire [in the stopcock system] dilates, refresh and water the whole bed regularly, and with greate delight to the beholder. Besides this, it will also reach the topps of the highest trees, destroy Caterpillars, and other noxious Insects: In summ, of all the Gardiners Instruments, this most is the most elegant, usefull, and Philosophical. (ibid., 89) Hill had already illustrated a simpler, hand-pumped sprinkler a century earlier and was similarly effusive in his excitement about the benefits to the plants and gardener (Hill 1577, sig. G3r).

Creepy Crawlies Beyond the caterpillars targeted by Evelyn’s watering system, no gardening text failed to detail the pests that might lurk like a serpent under “the innocent flower.” The shepherd Perigot in John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess provides an accidental catalogue of a garden’s dangers as he describes his idea of an idyll: Beshrewe my Tardy stepps, here shalt thou rest: Uppon this holy bancke no deadly snake, Uppon this Turffe her selfe in foulds doth make, Here is no poyson, for the Toadsto feed. Here boldly spread thy handes, no venomd weed, Dares blister them, No slymy snaile dare creepe, Over thy face when thou art fast a sleepe, Here never durst the bablinge Cuckoe spitt. No slough off dying Starr did ever hitt. Uppon this Banckelet this thy Cabin bee. This other set with violets for mee. (1610, sig. F1v) Perigot’s focus is on the snakes, toads, and snails that might disrupt a garden. Cuckoo spit is a frothy white liquid produced by the juvenile nymphs

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of the froghopper insect, so-named for appearing with the first cuckoos. Though unsightly on plants, it was actually harmless, and elsewhere included in medicines for cold impostumes on horses (Markham 1610, 426). Hill’s creepy crawlies include snails, cankerworms, moths, fleas, earthworms, moles, ants, gnats, flies, frogs, snakes, scorpions, toads, mice, and weasels. Edward Topsell’s The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes (1607) and The Historie of Serpents (1608) discuss a staggering array of living creatures and their interactions with humans, both positive and negative. These include the animals that could be found around the home garden, such as frogs and toads: the green frog, for example, has uses in treating fevers and preventing hair growth, but it is also poisonous and makes cattle unwell if they accidentally eat them and causes men’s hands to blister if held (Topsell 1608, sig. R3r–v). Hill also warned that on warm summer nights, frogs “are wonte to be disquieters to the weried husbandmen through their dayly laboure, by chyrping and loude noyse making,” and recommended using a bright lantern to confuse them into thinking it was still daytime (1577, sig. I3r). Among other methods, Hill recommends keeping “yong Cattes” to scare away moles that will dig in the garden (ibid., sig. I1v). Yet Sir Thomas Hanmer (1659 [1933]) warned that cats were themselves inclined to dig and defecate in turned earth and were a problem “espetially in Townes if not prevented,” highlighting variations in the problems faced by urban and country gardeners (Hanmer 1659 [1933], 16). In preparing and maintaining garden beds, manure was both an important soil conditioner and a possible carrier of infectious miasmas. Hill therefore discusses preferred animal sources, as well as alternatives such as river silt and ashes, which deterred further garden pests (1577, sig. B6r). Snakes were another threat, and Hill reveals a belief that applying the juice of radishes to the hands would enable the gardener to “handle Serpents without feare” (1577, sig. Cc2r). Some, including Hill, also believed that snakes could enter the bodies of people who slept on the ground. If lucky, these could be flushed out using foul-smelling smoke (ibid., sigs I3v–I4r). Stephen Bradwell’s discussion of the problem suggests that tapeworms may have inspired this belief (1633, sig. C 6r–v). In other accounts, the story’s obvious links to Eve and the serpent in the Garden of Eden were inevitably made paramount to demonstrate the threats posed to people, and especially women, who might use private gardens to indulge in sins such as sloth (see, e.g., Anon 1664). While insects posed a constant threat to plants, others threatened the health of the gardeners themselves. Surgeons and physicians such as Daniel Turner regularly included instructions for treating insect stings and bites in their medical texts. For wasp stings, Turner says, “Some of our Country People apply hot Cow-dung upon the Part, others anoint only with Honey, or lay on some bruised Mallows,” though he did not consider these to be foolproof remedies: by this “they pretend to remove all Hurts of this Nature, tho’ I have known them foil’d, and sometimes disappointed” (Turner 1714,

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sig. Z4r). One woman is recorded burning spiders and their webs with a candle, only to have one “presently burst with a great Crack and thr[o]w his Liquor, some into her Eyes but mostly upon her Lips,” from which a great swelling ensues (ibid., sig. Z1v). Yet spiders’ webs, Turner records, can also be of use and are “by the common People, apply’d to recent Wounds, on Account of the Flux of Blood, which are according to Celsus, a noble Agglutinative for small Hurts” (ibid., sig. Y8v, original emphasis). Shakespeare says as much in Bottom’s address to Titania’s servant, Cobweb: “I shall desire you of more acquaintance, good Master Cobweb: if I cut my finger, I shall make bold with you” (Shakespeare 2007, Act III, scene I, lines 144–5). Hill similarly warns that when administering his recipe to rid plants of “Canker Wormes,” “the Gardener must be very warie, and have an attentive eye, that none of the mixture fall on his face nor hands” since it will irritate and burn (1577, sig. H4r). Enclosed gardens could offer protection to household animals. The keeper of the Oxford Physic Garden from 1641, Jacob Bobart, famously kept a pet goat, evidently considering the pleasure of its company to outweigh the risk of inconvenience from its indiscriminate diet (Willes 2011, 197). Gascoigne’s guide to hunting includes guidance on keeping and training dogs and details the fenced yard to be provided for their exercise, where “the greater and larger that it is, the better it will be for the Houndes, bicause they shall have the greater pleasure to play themselves, and to skommer [defecate],” with a fountain of water and sheltered kennel for warmth (Gascoigne 1575a, sigs B5v–B6r). Lawson advocates the keeping of bees, which “make a pleasant noyse and sight” in addition to providing honey (1618, sig. I1v). It was generally recognized that the stings of bees and wasps, “however slighted by some, [are] very troublesome and dangerous to others,” and a wide number of different causes were provided for this variation (Turner 1714, sig. Z3r). Lawson assures the reader that “they hurt not, whom they know,” and subsequently the gardener need not fear their stings; rather, they will provide an added level of security for the garden, since they “hate none but their enemies . . . and in that case onely (and who can blame them?) they are manly, and fight desperately” (1618, sigs I1v–I2r). Another belief attributed the safety of the gardener to his or her own virtue, rather than the bees, since “[t]hey are so Chaste, that they will sting those that smell of Copulation”—a belief passed down from Plutarch’s Moralia (Turner 1697, 50).

Choosing Plants Aside from the use of herbals to teach plant identification, planning a garden also offered an element of species control and reduced the expense of time in foraging. Plants that had previously grown wild were brought into the domestic garden for greater convenience and control, as Hill describes of the artichoke, “which before grew wilde in the fieldes, [and] came by

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diligence (for the benefite of sale) to bee carefully bestowed in the Garden, where through travell, broughte from his wildenesse, to serve unto the use of the mouth and bellie” (Hill 1577, sig. R1r). Lawson discusses the problem of maids not being able to tell a weed from a useful plant and “advise[s] the Mistresse, eyther to be present her self, or to teach her maides to know hearbes from weedes” and so prevent them removing useful plants (1618, sig. M1r). This also prevented the maid serving up a possibly poisonous weed in food—a risk exacerbated outside the garden, where foraging in woods, hedgerows, and among the ruins of old buildings was a standard practice (Thirsk 2006, 313). Mushrooms were known to sometimes be poisonous, and John Gerard gives descriptions of the physical characteristics, habitats, and uses of a variety of different types in his illustrated Herball, first published in 1597. Although he concludes that some are indeed edible, the risk of misidentification and ingestion of a harmful fungus is too great: “Therefore I give my advice unto those that love such strange and new fangled meates, to beware of licking honey among thornes, lest the sweetnesse of the one do not countervaile the sharpness and pricking of the other” (Gerard 1633, sig. Rrrrrr5v). In contrast to their proverbially quick germination, mushrooms were therefore not an overnight success in early modern English cooking (Tilley 1950, M1319 “A mushroom grows in a night”). Many people were still wary, having heard horror stories of poisonings and the stern warnings of herbal books, and medical texts included recipes for purges in case of ingestion (Hill 1577, sig. M2r suggests colewort; see also Bradwell 1638, sigs C4v–C6r). Yet mushrooms had been a fashionable food at the beginning of the sixteenth century and enjoyed another resurgence from the 1660s thanks to the influence of French cooking, at which point they also moved into controlled agricultural production (Thirsk 2006, 41, 293). Even useful plants were known to have harmful side effects. Those who used the produce of their own garden or elsewhere to administer medically to others risked accusations of witchcraft or incurred the wrath of medical authorities, as Margaret Kennix discovered in 1581 when Elizabeth I had to defend her from the Royal College of Physicians (Pelling and White 2004). Arum (arum maculatum), also known as starchwort, was boiled to produce the large amount of starch required for fashionable ruffs and collars. Yet it could also hurt the skin, and it was advised to “let the Laundres provide wel for her hands: for it will chop, chinke and blister them exceedingly” (Clapham 1608, sig. G8v). Mayweed was similarly considered to “raiseth blisters upon the hands of the weeders and reapers” charged with removing it from crops (Gerard 1633, sig. Rrr5v). Comfrey leaves “are long, broad, rough, and pricking withall, something hairie, and being handled make the hands itch” (ibid., sig. Xxx5v). Hill considered that weeding was indeed best done by hand, since there was less “feare of feebling the yong plants” than by raking or the use of any other “Iron instrument” (1577, sig. F4r). I have not found references to the use of gardening gloves, but some people may have

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heeded the advice from such as Pliny’s Natural History, which warned that plants such as rue would blister the hands of a weeder, “unlesse the hands be well gloved, or defensed with oile” (tr. Holland 1634, sig. D3r; the advice appears in the Natural History at 19.45).

Weather The gardener was in many respects at the mercy of the climate, and the garden manuals deal at length with the problems posed to plants by storms, hail, lightning, frost, mist, rust, and burning by the sun. Evelyn advocated a detailed understanding of the weather and how it could be managed through innovation so that the garden could be most productively enjoyed: This Theorie, then is so necessary for our Gardiner that without some knowledge in it, he shall be exceedingly to seeke, when he would either cultivate the Earth, improve, or gather the fruits of it: And therefore in our rainy and unseasonable Climate {happy} inventions may be found out to prevent inconveniences, redubble the vigour of the Sun, and protract the Autumne; to præocupate the Spring and moderate the Winter, and Mr Beale has {it will be} shew’d us how to make such choyce {even} of Plants as may warme the ayre for others, more tender & lesse hardy. {& how to plant to the best advantage}. (2001, 58–59: words crossed out are Evelyn’s deletions, words in {} are his later insertions) The garden should be designed to manage local conditions for the benefit of everyone who may set foot in there. In rainy England, Hill says, paths should be sprinkled with river or sea sand so that people walking after rain are not troubled by “earth cleaving or clagging to their feet,” and gutters dug to allow controlled run-off (1577, sigs. C4v, C5v). Archaeology confirms that paths in formal gardens of varying social levels were often covered in gravel (for example, Bond and Isles 1991, 50; Egan 1984, 315). The walls and trellises of enclosed gardens provided protection from the wind, rain, snow, and sun for both plants and people. Garden writers discuss different ways of growing plants accustomed to other climates and making native plants crop out of season. Sometimes this was for social or political benefit, such as Sir Francis Carew’s manipulation of ripening cherries to impress Elizabeth I (Bushnell 2003, 58). In other cases, increasing the out-of-season availability was an active method of increasing access to each plant’s health benefits, aligned with the extensive household production of preserves. Hill recommends growing cucumbers in old baskets filled with well-manured earth that can be kept outdoors on sunny days or those with a light rain but moved under cover or into a building at night “to bee defended from the frostes and colde ayre” (1577,

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r

sig. Dd3 ). He emphasizes the practical measures required to facilitate this labour and ease the strain on the gardener: This one thing I thinke necessarie to be learned, for the avoyding of the dayly labour and paynes, in the setting abroade and carrying into the house, either halfe Tubbes, Baskettes, or Earthen Pannes, whiche on this wise, by greater facilytie, may be done, if so be the Gardener bestowe the vessels with the plantes, in Wheelebarrowes, or suche lyke with wheeles, for these, to mens reason, causes marvellous easines, both in the bestowing abroade, and carrying again into the warme house, as often as neede shall require. (ibid., sig. Dd3v) Evelyn advises a similar preparation of iron loops or bars on wooden plant baskets, “according to their weight and bignesse” (2001, 89; Ingram 2001, 5). Sir Thomas Hanmer taught Evelyn a large amount of his garden knowledge and expressed a similar view in his manuscript garden book (Willes 2011, 256; Hanmer 1659 [1933], 9–10). He wrote that [m]any plants which come to us from hot Clymates will not endure our cold open aire abroad in Wynter, and must be kept in tubbs or earth vessels filled with earth to bee transportable into places of shelter as soon as the frosts begin to bee dangerous and subsequently recommended indoor plant spaces warmed by pans of coal or a stove (Hanmer 1659 [1933], 9–10). Evelyn would be one of the first to use a thermometer to regulate temperature in his garden buildings and marveled at the subterranean heating system installed at the new Chelsea Physic Garden conservatory in 1685 (Harris 2011, 96). Hartlib thought it entirely the fault of England’s “ill Husbandry” that the country was compelled to import fruit and nuts like quinces, walnuts, chestnuts, and prunes, along with produce like French wine, that could be grown or made successfully at home: not to do so was an extravagance meant to avoid labour, and one that weakened the nation (1651, sig. D4r, original emphasis). Alternatively, one might cultivate an indoor garden as described by Sir Hugh Plat, with pots, window baskets, or even trees and vines trained to grow into the room and along the ceiling (Plat 1608, sigs. C7v–D3r). These pots would most likely have been ornamental, since, although they were not unknown, the mass production of common clay flowerpots only commenced in the early eighteenth century (Currie 1993, 229). This aesthetic approach would complement advice to position one’s garden so that it might be viewed to best advantage from key entertaining rooms. Such steps offered complete protection to the lady or gentleman wishing to enjoy the garden and could provide year-round access to some of its green health benefits.

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A specific weather concern to the garden occupant was the risk of sunburn. The face was considered particularly liable to different skin problems, “not only on Account of its thinner and finer Texture; but more especially for that [it is] more exposed to the Air’s Cold, and the Sun’s Heat” (Turner 1714, sig. N3r). The effects of outdoor activities on the skin were closely tied to assumptions of rank and gender. Gascoigne’s knight laments the time wasted in outdoor pursuits like hunting, which resulted in a hardened, ungentlemanly exterior: “In frosts I felt no cold, a sunneburnt hew was best, / I sweate and was in temper still, my watching seemed rest” (1575b, sig. P3v). Women in particular were encouraged to maintain a fair skin, and there was no shortage of recipes in herbals to help ease a sunburn and to lighten the skin from freckles and tanning (Snook 2011). Hill informs his readers that drinking a distillation of white beets prevents sunburn, while the white poppy not only serves to whiten the skin but “[t]his water applied with linnen clothes wet in it, extinguisheth any heate, and profiteth a burnt skinne through theSun, in removing the heate, by the often applying of linnen clothes wette in it” (1577, sigs M4r, Dd2r). Topsell considered that women would be the particular beneficiaries of his recipe for a protective lip salve produced from rosewater and the fat of a wild goat “to heale the fissures of the lippes and nose, which is much desired of women, not only for the before rehearsed virtue, but also because by annointing they keepe by it their face from Sunneburning” (Topsell 1607, sig. Z4v; on rosewater see also Tyers, this volume). This fat is lanolin, which is still a key constituent of lip salves today. In the garden itself, Hill prescribes upright “herbers,” trellised with plants such as vines, melons, and cucumbers, so that these plants, “running and spreading all over, might so shadowe and keepe both the heate and Sunne from the walkers and sitters there vnder” (1577, sig. C3v). Hill’s point is emphasized by the woodcut illustration, which shows two laboring men in broad-brimmed hats winding and pruning a climbing rose (there are visible thorns and flowers) on the large arched herber (ibid.). Beneath it is a table, establishing it as an entertaining space, and they are further protected by a garden wall. In the corner, the sun looks down on the laborers, with a sad expression, as if defeated—its beams of heat are clearly delineated in the illustration and come to an abrupt end at the shading wall. Hill offers a choice of plants to be used for the herber, some of which will grow high enough to offer full shade, while others will not grow as tall, and as such offer less protection, “yet this commoditie ensueth by the Herber, that the owners friendes sitting in the same, maye the freelier see and beholde the beautie of the Garden, to theyr greate delyght” (ibid., sig. C4r). Fragrant climbing plants such as jasmine and damask rose “not onely defendeth the heate of the Sunne, but yeeldeth a delectable smell, much refreshing the sitters vnder it,” yet require more maintenance than vines (ibid., sig. C4v; and on the therapeutic qualities of scent, see Tyers, this volume). The ideal herber thus balanced aesthetic, labor, olfactory, and protective concerns to maximize its benefit.

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Many other illustrations of garden labor show men wearing broadbrimmed hats as they work outside, such as on Lawson’s title page. An unidentified woodcut pasted into the flyleaf of a 1577 edition of The Gardeners Labyrinth provides a rare early modern illustration of women working in gardens: two of them rake and chip out weeds, alongside male laborers, and all are wearing broad-brimmed sunhats (Bodleian Library, MS Douce 399; I thank Rachael White for inspecting this copy for me). The shepherdess heroine in Martin Parker’s ballad “The Countrey Lasse” (1628) presents herself as a model of “modest honest innocence,” decently working for her father—in her labor she is “shrewd[ed] . . . from the Sunne” by “A garland of the fairest flowers,” or “[a] homely Hat . . . which well my face protecteth” (Parker 1628, sig. A1r). She also reassures herself that a tan will not have a detrimental effect on her overall health, or her social position, and will only be temporary: “If Summers heat my beauty staine, / it makes me nere the sicker” and will fade in the dark winter. Another example forms the title page of Johann Sibmacher’s pattern book (1604), which was reused along with several patterns by James Boler for The Needle’s Excellency (1631; in Beck 1997, 44). This shows three women in a garden, with “Industry” embroidering under the center of a shady tree while dressed plainly and in a sensible broad-brimmed hat. She is juxtaposed with women on either side, representing Wisdom and Folly, who are more fashionably dressed, with more restricted headwear. Similarly, the Country Lass’s headwear provides protection from “Titans heat,” keeps her fair despite her outdoor work, and is here added to with a moral distinction between her “homely Hat” and the protective fans and masks of fashionable “City Wives [who] lead wanton lives (Parker 1628, sig. A1r). Masks and veils may have served to protect the face in leisure but would be less practical for active occupation, and the transparent cypress or lawn would have been unaffordable to such as the Country Lass. Thomas Middleton gently mocks such behavior in No Wit/No Help Like a Womans by having the Clown announce that he is so hot, he has “thrown a Cypress over my face for fear of Sunburning” (Middleton 1657, sig. C5v). This personal protective equipment could thus be combined with the herbers and trees to guard the skin of those working and resting in the garden.

Conclusion Whether working themselves or enjoying the fruits of others’ labors, people in gardens shared a desire to make the most of the environment’s healthgiving properties. The enclosure of garden spaces allowed greater control over many of the problems that might naturally occur, but further work and understanding were also required. The garden manuals thus engage with each of the key tenets of risk management. They advocate the elimination of hazards such as poisonous animals and draw from more overtly medical texts for remedies. They prescribe design elements such as boundary walls,

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pathways, and manageable garden bed sizes that will allow easy access for those working in and visiting the garden. Those laboring in the space will ideally be provided with equipment that is suitable for the purpose, of a proper size for the user, and has drawn on the experience and ingenuity of the gardener and others to obtain and develop these tools. The manuals themselves served an important training function, while the expertise of the housewife in guiding her maids, or the professional gardener training his sons or apprentices, would similarly work to ensure safety and productivity. Finally, garden users could be protected from the elements, and especially the sun, not only by structures such as trellises and walls but also through the personal protective equipment of hats and medical salves. Just as health was itself understood as a question of maintaining balance, so, too, was the production of a healthy space in areas such as a garden recognized to require active negotiation of dangers. This involved ensuring not only that every nettle sting could be soothed by a dock weed leaf but also that the plants themselves were tamed or removed, and laborers trained to prevent their hands from grasping them in the first place.

Bibliography Allen, Marion E., ed., 1989. Wills of the Archdeaconry of Suffolk 1620–24. Suffolk Records Society. Woodbridge: Boydell. Anon., 1664. A Warning for All Such as Desire to Sleep Upon the Grass: By the Example of Mary Dudson Maid-Servant to Mr. Phillips a Gardener, Dwelling in Kent Street, in the Borough of Southwark: Being a Most Strange, but True Relation How She Was Found in a Dead-Sleep in the Garden, That No Ordinary Noise Could Awake Her: As Also How an Adder Entered into Her Body, the Manner of Her Long Sickness, with a Brief Discovery of the Cause at Length by Her Strange and Most Miraculous Vomiting up of about Fourteen Young Adders, and One Old Adder, on August 14. 1664. about Fourteen Inches in Length, the Maid Is Yet Living: The Like to This Hath Not Been Known in This Age: The Tune Is, in Summer Time. London. Bartos, Jim, 2010. “The Spirituall Orchard: God, Garden and Landscape in SeventeenthCentury England before the Restoration.” Garden History 38.2: 177–193. Beck, Thomasina, 1997. Gardening with Silk and Gold: A History of Gardens in Embroidery. Newton Abbot: David and Charles. Bending, Stephen, 2013. Green Retreats: Women, Gardens and Eighteenth-Century Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bond, C. J., and R. Isles, 1991. “Early Gardens in Avon and Somerset.” In Garden Archaeology, edited by A. E. Brown, 36–52. London: Council for British Archaeology. Bradwell, Stephen, 1633. Helps for Suddain Accidents Endangering Life. London. Bushnell, Rebecca, 2003. Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety, 1997–2017. “Hazard Control.” www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/hsprograms/hazard_control.html Clapham, Henoch, 1608. Errour on the Left Hand, through a Frozen Securitie. London. Crane, Mary, 2009. “Illicit Privacy and Outdoor Spaces in Early Modern England.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9.1: 4–22. “Cuckoo Spit.” Royal Horticultural Society. www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?PID=490

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Currie, C. K., 1993. “The Archaeology of the Flowerpot in England and Wales, circa 1650–1950.” Garden History 21.2: 227–246. Egan, Geoff, 1984. “Post-Medieval Britain in 1983.” Post-Medieval Archaeology 18.1: 307–325. Evans, Nesta, ed., 1987. The Wills of the Archdeaconry of Sudbury 1630–1635. Woodbridge: Boydell for the Suffolk Records Society. Evans, Nesta, ed., 1993. Wills of the Archdeaconry of Sudbury 1636–1638. Suffolk Records Society. Woodbridge: Boydell. Evelyn, John, 2001. Elysium Britannicum, or the Royal Gardens, ed. John E. Ingram. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Fletcher, John, 1610. The Faithfull Shepheardesse. London. Gascoigne, George, 1575a. The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting. London. Gascoigne, George, 1575b. The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire. London. Gerard, John, 1633. The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes. London. Gowing, Laura, 1993. “Gender and the Language of Insult in Early Modern London.” History Workshop 35: 1–21. Hanmer, Thomas, 1659 [1933]. The Garden Book of Sir Thomas Hanmer Bart, ed. Eleanour Sinclair Rohde. London: Geralde Howe. Harris, Stephen, 2011. Planting Paradise: Cultivating the Garden, 1501–1900. Oxford: Bodleian Library. Hartlib, Samuel, 1651. Samuel Hartlib His Legacie: Or an Enlargement of the Discourse of Husbandry Used in Brabant and Flaunders. London. Hill, Thomas, 1577. The Gardeners Labyrinth Containing a Discourse of the Gardeners Life. London. Hitchcock, Tim, Robert Shoemaker, Sharon Howard, and Jamie McLaughlin, et al., 2012. London Lives, 1690–1800. www.londonlives.org, version 1.1. Hodgson, Elizabeth, 2015. “A ‘Paraditian Creature’: Eve and Her Unsuspecting Garden in Seventeenth-Century Literature.” In Biblical Women in Early Modern Literary Culture 1550–1700, edited by Victoria Brownlee and Laura Gallagher, 41–58. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Holland, Philemon, tr., 1634. Pliny the Elder, the Historie of the World. London. Ingram, John E., 2001. “John Evelyn and His ‘Elysium Britannicum’.” In Elysium Britannicum, or the Royal Gardens, edited by John E. Ingram, 1–10. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lawson, William, 1618. A New Orchard and Garden. London. Markham, Gervase, 1610. Markhams Maister-Peece, or, What Doth a Horse-Man Lacke. London. McRae, Andrew, 1996. God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Middleton, Thomas, 1657. No Wit/No Help Like a Womans. London. Munroe, Jennifer, 2008. Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature. Aldershot: Ashgate. Nash, Thomas, 1599. Nashes Lenten Stuffe. London. Parker, Martin, 1628. The Countrey Lasse. London. Pelling, Margaret, and Frances White, 2004. “KENNIX, Margaret.” In Physicians and Irregular Medical Practitioners in London 1550–1640 Database. British History Online. www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/london-physicians/1550-1640/ kennix-margaret [Accessed 16 August 2016]. Plat, Hugh, 1608. Floraes Paradise. London. Sawday, Jonathan, 2007. Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine. London and New York: Routledge. Shakespeare, William, 2007. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” In William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

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Snook, Edith, 2011. Women, Beauty and Power in Early Modern England: A Feminist Literary History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Spence, Craig, 2016. Accidents and Violent Death in Early Modern London, 1650– 1750. Woodbridge: Boydell. Straub, Susan C., 2012. “Dissembling his Art: ‘Gascoigne’s Gardnings’.” In Locus Amoenus: Gardens and Horticulture in the Renaissance, edited by Alexander Samson, 95–110. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Strype, John, 1698. The Life of the Learned Sir Thomas Smith Kt. London. Thirsk, Joan, 2006. Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions 1500– 1760. London: Hambledon Continuum. Tigner, Amy L., 2012. Literature and the Renaissance Garden from Elizabeth I to Charles II. Farnham: Ashgate. Tilley, Morris Palmer, 1950. A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: A Collection of the Proverbs Found in English Literature and the Dictionaries of the Period. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Topsell, Edward, 1607. The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes. London. Topsell, Edward, 1608. The Historie of Serpents. London. Turner, Daniel, 1714. De Morbis Cutaneis: A Treatise of Diseases Incident to the Skin. London. Turner, William, 1697. A Compleat History of the Most Remarkable Providences, Both of Judgement and Mercy, Which Have Hapned in This Present Age. London. Whittle, Jane, 2005. “Servants in Rural England c.1450–1650: Hired Work as a Means of Accumulating Wealth and Skill before Marriage.” In The Marital Economy in Scandinavia and Britain 1400–1900, edited by Maria Ågren and Amy Louise Erickson, 89–107. Aldershot: Ashgate. Willes, Margaret, 2011. The Making of the English Gardener: Plants, Books and Inspiration 1560–1660. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Worlidge, John, 1677. Systema Horticulturae, or, the Art of Gardening. London.

Part III

The Imagined Garden

6

“To Play bi an Orchardside” Orchards as Enclosures of Queer Space in Lanval and Sir Orfeo Amy Louise Morgan

In his archaeological study of elite landscapes in the medieval period, Oliver H. Creighton (2009, 47) states that “[g]ardens were, in a sense, transformative, mediating domestic spaces—carefully managed points of interface between the household and the natural world beyond.” It is the transformative, hybrid, and liminal space of the enclosed garden that I examine in this chapter. In particular, I argue that in Marie de France’s Anglo-Norman/ Old French twelfth-century lai Lanval and the anonymous fourteenthcentury Middle English Breton lay Sir Orfeo, the transformative nature of the orchard marks the space as inherently queer and creates the potential for transgressive acts and Otherworldly encounters. In Lanval, the setting of the orchard allows Marie de France to invert common conventions of medieval literature and gender politics to present an alternative gender dynamic between knight and lady. It is also the physical space in which the protagonist Lanval is directly accused of sodomy. In Sir Orfeo, the “ympe-tre” (Sir Orfeo, l. 70; all Middle English references are from Bliss 1966, and modern English translations from Tolkien 1975, with line numbers) in the orchard functions as a limen to the Otherworld, and thus, the orchard is presented as a permeable space that is open to the supernatural fairies.

The Historical Orchard In order to fully explore the queer potential of the literary orchard, it is first necessary to briefly examine the historical orchard and its purpose in the medieval period. Orchards were a particular type of garden used for cultivating different fruit trees and demarcated by enclosure. The etymology of the word orchard, from the Old English ort-geard, meaning “enclosed garden,” further equates the medieval orchard with the physical and cultural space of the pleasure garden (Toller 1898, 767). Even the biggest medieval orchards, such as those belonging to the church or the Crown, would have been enclosed by a wall, ditch, hedge, or fence in order to keep out animals and intruders. Although illustrations of orchards are sparse, it is often suggested that they were also maintained for aesthetic purposes and provided wooded, fragrant, and shady walks for their owners (McLean 1981, 247).

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As I shall suggest in the following with regard to Lanval and Sir Orfeo, the fact that orchards were contained spaces of natural beauty bound by enclosure means that they can be thought of in terms of the locus amoenus. This point is also emphasized by Creighton, who notes that castles especially were connected to vast pleasure grounds that could contain “orchards, vineyards, groves, walkways, areas dedicated to sporting activities, terraces, mounds, trees, ponds and fountains” (2009, 45). Thus, the medieval orchard had two specific functions; on a practical level it provided fruit that was used for culinary purposes, but it also had a wider function as a space of beauty and pleasure (and see also Tyers’s chapter in this volume). In her analysis of pleasure gardens, Arlyn Diamond describes gardens as “social spaces, designed for multiple functions . . . they appear to permit, or encourage, the crossing of boundaries between ranks and genders” (Diamond 2010, 127). I argue that it is for this reason that the multivalent space of the orchard is filled with queer potential. Particularly in literary imaginings, orchards become loci of agency where transgressive and queer acts are performed. In the rest of this chapter, I demonstrate that in Lanval and Sir Orfeo, the orchard is thus a dangerous queer space precisely because it destabilizes heteronormative boundaries by providing a place for transgressive behaviors and interactions with the female or supernatural Other.

Queens Behaving Badly: Female Masculinity and Queer Space in Lanval Marie de France’s lai Lanval tells the story of an overlooked foreign knight at King Arthur’s court. Feeling dejected after Arthur fails to reward him with land and women, Lanval leaves the court and lies down under a tree in a meadow. While there, he is visited by two fairies who take them to meet their lady, the Fairy Maiden. The Fairy Maiden immediately confesses her love for Lanval and promises him unlimited wealth, her love, and her body, providing he does not reveal her identity or their secret to anyone. Shortly after this initial encounter between the Fairy Maiden and Lanval and following the feast of St John, we are told that D’ici qu’a trente chevalier S’ierent alé esbanïer En un vergier desuz la tur U la reïne ert a surjur as many as thirty knights had gone to relax in a garden beneath the tower where the queen was staying (Lanval, ll. 220–224; all Old French references are from Ewert 2001, and English translations from Burgess and Busby 2003, with line numbers)

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The substantive vergier is often glossed simply as garden, but the word more specifically denotes a culinary garden or an orchard (Anglo-Norman Dictionary, s.v. “vergier”). This introduction of the orchard as a setting in the lay inverts the common connotations of the enclosed garden with femininity. Instead of opening this scene with images of spring, blossoming foliage, and the female body, Marie chooses instead to direct the reader’s gaze to the bodies of the male knights as they relax beneath the phallic tower that the queen inhabits. One key point raised by this placement of the male body in the enclosed orchard is thus that the knights are presented as exposed and, as I will show, vulnerable to the female gaze. As highlighted earlier, it was not unusual for the historical orchard to be used as a quiet space for relaxation and recreation. The inclusion of thirty knights in this normally secluded space, however, implies some deeper purpose for their leisurely use of the orchard. I suggest that the knights are positioned beneath the queen’s tower with the intention of engaging in the practices of courtly love, a recurrent motif by the twelfth century, as attested by Louis-Georges Tin in his examination of heterosexual culture (Tin 2012, 15). This argument is reinforced in the lay when Marie informs us that the knights bring Lanval to the orchard because he is “larges e cuteis” (generous and courtly; Lanval, l. 231) and then later still when they take the ladies by the hand and we are informed that the “[c]il parlemenz n’iert pas vilains” (conversation was not uncourtly; Lanval, l. 252). For my purposes here, it is important to note that while the other knights and ladies in the lay thus appear to follow the normative practices of courtly love where the men take on the active role of courtly lover, both Lanval and the queen subvert these practices. It is the queen whose behavior is most unexpected, however, as she reverses the trope completely and actively pursues Lanval once he becomes subject to her gaze: S’esteit la reïne apuïe. Treis dames ot ensemble od li. La maisnie le rei choisi, Lanval conut e esgarda. The queen, in the company of three ladies, was reclining when she caught sight of the king’s household and recognized Lanval. (Lanval, ll. 238–241) In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale, we are presented with the more familiar motif of the female body enclosed in the garden and subject to the male gaze: And so bifel, by aventure or cas, That thurgh a wyndow, thikke of many a barre

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The emphasis on voyeurism in this scene as Palamon “cast[s] his eye” upon Emily is more in keeping with normative gender roles and separation between the sexes; the knights are situated in a phallic tower while Emily is presented as an idealized image of femininity in the garden below. As highlighted by Roberta Magnani, in her exploration of the hortus conclusus’s queer potential, while enclosed in the feminized garden Emily is subject to public surveillance and “the triple gaze of the narrator and the two knights” (Magnani 2014, 95; and see Diamond 2010, 126–127). In Lanval, it is not the female body that is subject to the male gaze but the male bodies of the knights who fall under the voyeuristic gaze of the queen. Once she has recognized Lanval, the queen sends one of her ladies to gather the most beautiful ladies of her household, and they go to join the knights in the orchard. From the moment that she enters the enclosure of the orchard, the queen displays, what Halberstam has termed “female masculinity,” the conceptualization of “masculinity without men” (Halberstam 1998, 2). Within this space the queen is presented as dominant, overtly sexual and appropriates the role of (male) courtly lover. Luce Irigaray argues that women are commodities exchanged between men in order to strengthen homosocial relations and uphold the patriarchy (Irigaray 1985). While we are presented with this view of women in the opening of the lai of Lanval where women are exchanged as part of Arthur’s largesse, the queen and the Fairy Maiden challenge this concept through their agency. As noted by Sharon Kinoshita and Peggy McCracken (2012, 10), Marie offers us the possibility of “worlds in which women could choose their own lovers.” In Lanval, the queen as a married woman is not afforded the same level of freedom as the Fairy Maiden. However, by appropriating the male role of active courtly lover, the queen transgresses the boundaries of normative practices and demonstrates that the orchard provides a space where women can take control of their sexual desires. Through her propositioning of Lanval, it is clear that the queen is accustomed to acting on her sexual impulses and seeing her desires fulfilled: “Lanval, mut vus ai honuré E mut cheri e mut amé. Tute m’amur poëz aveir.

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Kar me dites vostre voleir. Ma druërie vus otrei; Mut devez ester lié de mei.” “Lanval, I have honoured, cherished and loved you much. You may have all my love: just tell me what you desire! I grant you my love and you should be glad to have me.” (Lanval, ll. 263–268) Here the queen is offering herself to Lanval in parallel terms to the Fairy Maiden’s, but it is her own self-worth that is given precedence by her statement that he should be pleased to obtain her, “Mut devez ester lié de mei.” This indicates that the queen’s “love” for Lanval is entirely selfish; she participates in the practice of courtly love to flatter her own vanity and fulfill her own sexual desires. In their theorization of queer time and space, Halberstam argues that “[q]ueer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality and reproduction” (Halberstam 2005, 4–5). By actively seeking an adulterous (admittedly heterosexual) relationship, the queen in Lanval is resisting the “institutions” of family and reproduction and aligning herself with queer uses of time and space. Furthermore, Halberstam writes that in Western civilization, “long periods of stability are considered to be desirable, and people who live in rapid bursts . . . are characterized as immature and even dangerous” (ibid.). By participating in female masculinity within the enclosure of the orchard, the queen can be seen to be rejecting heteronormative practices, and her desire to push at the boundaries of courtly behavior indicates that she is choosing to live in these rapid bursts of pleasure and thus represents a danger to normative courtliness. The transgressive, sexually charged behavior of the queen reaffirms male anxieties about women in positions of power, namely, that queens who are transgressive exert political influence over their husbands and are able to damage homosocial relationships between the king and his vassals (McCracken 1998, 144–170). This is demonstrated in the lay when the queen taints Lanval’s homosocial relationships with his peers; angry at Lanval’s rejection she accuses him of sodomy: “Lanval,” fete le, “bien le quit. Vus n’amez gueres cel delit. Asez le m’ad hum dit sovent Que des femmez n’avez talent. Vallez avez bien afeitiez, Ensemble od eus vus deduiez. Vileins cuarz, mauveis failliz, Mu test mi sires maubailliz, Que pres de lui vus ad suffert; Mun escïent que Deus en pert.”

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I have reproduced the queen’s words in full to highlight the vehemence of her reaction. As William Burgwinkle has pointed out, the queen illogically reasons that Lanval’s refusal of her must mean that he has no desire for women and hence must prefer men. It is the queen’s accusation of sodomy and the subsequent trial that he faces that cause Lanval to permanently detach himself from the homosocial world of Arthur’s court (Burgwinkle 2004, 163–4). The queer space of the enclosed orchard therefore provides the catalyst for Lanval’s irrevocable break with the human world. Although he does not actually physically leave the courtly sphere until the end of the lai when he rides off with the Fairy Maiden, it is in the orchard that he reveals himself as out of synchronization with courtly norms and homosocial behavior. Following her impassioned exchange with Lanval and her subsequent appeal to King Arthur, the queen suddenly reverts to a more passive female role as she relinquishes control of Lanval’s fate to her husband. As stressed by McCracken, Lanval’s insult to the queen and her accusation against him are appropriated by Arthur, resulting in the silencing of the female voice (McCracken 1998, 157). The queen is a witness to Lanval’s trial but does not speak again in the lai, further supporting my thesis that it is only within the queer space of the enclosed orchard that the queen is able to perform the queer role of female masculinity. Outside of this locus of agency, the queen reverts to her role as wife and relinquishes the queer power that she openly displayed in the confines of the orchard. It is therefore apparent that the orchard in Lanval represents a dangerous space which transforms gender binaries, destabilizes heteronormative practices and creates a tension between normative and nonnormative behavior.

The Queer Touch of the Fairies and the “Ympe-tre” as Limen in Sir Orfeo In Sir Orfeo, on the other hand, the orchard is not presented as a dangerous space because of the sexual deviance of a queen but because of its direct connection with the Fairy Otherworld. The Otherworld is a queer space that “exists neither above nor below ours, but rather in another, parallel reality” (Saunders 1993, 46; and see Morgan 2015). The conflation of the orchard with the Otherworld thus marks the enclosed orchard as a space easily permeated by queer beings, in this case, the supernatural fairies who act as queering agents by disrupting normative teleologies and identities.

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The lay of Sir Orfeo is a medieval retelling of the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice; it reconfigures the story of Orpheus’s journey to the Underworld in terms of courtly norms. The narrative is situated in medieval England instead of classical Greece, and crucially, Queen Heurodis is not killed but is instead abducted by the Fairy King. Near the beginning of the lay Sir Orfeo we are given a conventional description of the beauty of nature in the spring; it is May “when miri & hot is þe day” (when glad and warm doth shine the day; Sir Orfeo, l. 58), and we are told that “eueri field is full of flowers,” while “blosme breme on eueri bouȝ” (every field is filled with flowers, on every branch the blossom blows; Sir Orfeo, ll. 58–60). This idyllic description is then continued as the Orfeo poet informs us that the queen, Heurodis, tok to maidens of priis, & went in an vndrentide To play bi an orchard-side, To se þe floures sprede & spring, & to here þe foules sing. Þai sett hem doun al þre Vnder a fair ympe-tre two maidens fair to garden green with her she took at drowsy tide of noon to stroll by orchard-side, to see the flowers there spread and spring and hear the birds on branches sing. There down in shade they sat all three beneath a fair young grafted tree (Sir Orfeo, ll. 64–70) The emphasis on the female character’s relationship with nature once more strengthens the topos of the idealized female body contained within the enclosed garden. This ideological representation of Heurodis, as we shall see, is very quickly transformed in the narrative as Heurodis takes on the role of queered being following the introduction of the fairies into the presumed safety of the walled orchard. The idyllic description of the orchard therefore serves an important function; it portrays the orchard as a cultivated, private space directly under the control of men. The intrusion of the fairies into this private space can therefore be read as a violation of private space, marking the enclosed orchard as a penetrable and vulnerable space where transgressions can occur. It is imperative that Heurodis chooses to sit beneath the “ympe-tre” at the queer time of “vndrentide.” Carolyn Dinshaw argues that the “howre of vnderon” (the “vndrentide”) provides “a moment of instability or vulnerability in both secular and biblical traditions” (Dinshaw 2012, 6, quote

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at 51). As a result of this mistake, Heurodis very suddenly falls into a deep sleep where she encounters the Fairy King and his retinue, and her maidens are afraid to wake her. Doob (1974, 177) argues that Heurodis is here committing the sin of sloth, which causes the deep sleep. This argument is not entirely convincing, however, as there is no indication that Heurodis is behaving wrongfully by simply enjoying the orchard in spring. In medieval literature, the “ympe-tre” or grafted tree is often used as an intersection between the human world and the Otherworld. This is noted by Saunders, who writes that the “unnatural, artificial quality of grafting and the association in Celtic legend of the most common type of grafted tree, the apple tree, with the otherworld, render the ‘ympe-tre’ a powerful symbol of the faery” (Saunders 2001, 228). I would take Saunders’s argument further and argue that the unnatural, hybrid nature of the grafted tree, of which there may have been many in the enclosed orchard, is not just a “powerful symbol of the faery” but also a symbol of queerness. That the term ympe-tre denotes a hybrid grafted tree is often commented on by critics (e.g., Bullock-Davies 1962); however, few note the fact that these trees can also be associated with youth and an element of transformation. In her study of medieval gardens in England, McLean (1981, 241) states that “grafts, scions, shoots and saplings were all called ‘imps’” and that they were produced in nursery gardens before being sold to gardeners, farmers, and estate managers. It is worth noting that “imps” were also used to form hedges and fences, and this perhaps explains why we are told specifically by the Orfeo poet that the “ympe-tre” is located at the “orchardside” (Sir Orfeo, l. 66). This space, as highlighted in the Middle English Dictionary, relates to the edges of an orchard and can thus be correlated with other liminal spaces in medieval literature such as the medieval forest, which is categorized by boundaries and often permeated by queer beings such as werewolves, giants, and fairies. The “orchardside” in Sir Orfeo takes on this role as a limen to the Otherworld and because of this it can be conceptualized through Carolyn Dinshaw’s study of asynchrony, which she describes as “different time frames or temporal systems colliding in a single moment of ‘now’” (Dinshaw 2012, 5, 4). I want to suggest that it is not only time that is “wonderful, marvellous, full of queer potential,” to use Dinshaw’s phrase, but it is also the queer space of the enclosed orchard that contains the potential for this asynchrony to occur and for bodies to be spirited away between worlds. When Orfeo sees Heurodis in the Fairy Otherworld she is sleeping beneath an “ympe-tre” that clearly parallels the “ympe-tre” growing in the enclosed orchard. The young tree itself is therefore a material threshold that provides the site for the two worlds to collide and interact with one another. The transformative and disruptive nature of the orchard and, more specifically, the “ympe-tre” is also reflected in Heurodis’s startling transition from “Þe fairest leuedi þat euer was bore” (the fairest lady ever born; Sir Orfeo, l. 210) to a monstrous queer being following her self-mutilation:

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Þat vnder-tide was al y-done. Ac, as sone as sche gan awake, Sche crid, & loþli bere gan make: Sche froted hir honden & hir fet, & crached hir visage—it bled wete; Hir riche robe hye al to-rett, & was reueyd out of hir witt. . . . till midday soon was passed, and come was afternoon. Then suddenly they heard her wake, and cry, and grievous clamour make; she writhed with limb, her hands she wrung, she tore her face till blood there sprung, her raiment rich in pieces rent; thus sudden out of mind she went. (Sir Orfeo, ll. 76–82; Tolkien ll. 75–82) While Heurodis can be viewed as a victim at this point in the text, her self-mutilation marks a moment of agency and has a queer valence. Up to this point, Heurodis has been described primarily in terms of her corporeal body. While, the Orfeo poet does convey that she is “(f)ul of love and godenisse” (goodness/virtue; Sir Orfeo, l. 77), the main emphasis is on her body, and it is her indescribable “fairnise” (Sir Orfeo, l. 56) that is her defining characteristic. As such her identity can be read in relation to Irigaray’s theorization of female beauty: “Female beauty is always considered a garment ultimately designed to attract the other into the self. . . . The mirror almost always serves to reduce us to pure exteriority” (Irigaray 1993, 65). Heurodis’s identity until the moment of her first encounter with the Fairy King is “pure exteriority,” and this is reaffirmed later in the lay when she becomes an inhabitant of the supernatural Otherworld and her body is reappropriated by the Fairy King. In this instance, though, the act of mutilating her own body temporarily breaks the mirror, and Heurodis takes control of her identity. The transgressive and dangerous nature of the fairies is therefore mirrored by Heurodis’s self-mutilation, and the enclosed orchard provides the setting for her queering and this act of defiance (Caldwell 2007, 299). Moreover, her broken and bleeding body is sharply juxtaposed with the beauty of the blossoming orchard. The destruction that her self-mutilation has caused on her once beautiful body is summarized by Orfeo, who laments, “O lef liif, what is te, Þat euer ȝete hast ben so stille & now gredest wonder schille? Þi bodi, þat was so white y-core,

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In her analysis of Margery Kempe, Carolyn Dinshaw argues that the queer touch “knocks signifiers loose, ungrounding bodies, making them strange, working in this way to provoke perceptual shifts and subsequent corporeal response in those touched” (Dinshaw 1999, 151). In Sir Orfeo, the queer touch of the fairies works in a similar way; the fairies’ intrusion of the human world and the enclosed space of the orchard destabilize Heurodis identity and set in motion a chain of events that threatens the stability of the kingdom. As this chapter has demonstrated, in the medieval lays Lanval and Sir Orfeo, the orchard is presented initially as a locus amoenus, a pleasure garden that displays conventional courtly images of mirth, courtly love, and beauty. These normative literary tropes are then dismantled by Marie de France and the Orfeo poet as the orchard is revealed to be a transformative, hybrid, and dangerous space that is filled with queer potential. The use of the orchard as a setting in both lays provides the impetus for queer interactions and inversions of normative behavior.

Bibliography Anglo-Norman Dictionary. www.anglo-norman.net/D/ Benson, Larry D., ed., 2008. Geoffrey Chaucer, the Riverside Chaucer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bliss, Arthur John, ed., 1966. Sir Orfeo. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bullock-Davies, Constance, 1962. “‘Ympe Tre’ and ‘Nemeton’.” Notes and Queries 9: 6–9. Burgess, Glyn S., and Keith Busby, tr., 2003. The Lais of Marie de France. London: Penguin. Burgwinkle, William E., 2004. Sodomy, Masculinity and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050–1230. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Caldwell, Ellen M., 2007. “The Heroism of Heurodis: Self-Mutilation and Restoration in Sir Orfeo.” Papers on Language and Literature 143: 291–310. Creighton, Oliver H., 2009. “Designs Upon the Land”: Elite Landscapes of the Middle Ages. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Diamond, Arlyn, 2010. “Meeting Grounds: Gardens in Middle English Romance.” In The Exploitations of Medieval Romance, edited by Laura Ashe, Ivana Djordjevic, and Judith Weiss, 125–138. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Dinshaw, Carolyn, 1999. Getting Medieval. London and Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dinshaw, Carolyn, 2012. How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time. London and Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Doob, Penelope, 1974. Nebuchadnezzar’s Children: Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Ewert, Alfred, ed., 2001. Marie de France Lais. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press. Halberstam, J., 1998. Female Masculinity. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Halberstam, J., 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press. Irigaray, Luce, 1985. “Women on the Market.” In This Sex Which Is Not One, edited by Luce Irigaray, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke, 170–191. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Irigaray, Luce, 1993. “Divine Women.” In Sexes and Genealogies, edited by Luce Irigaray, trans. Gillian C. Gill, 55–72. New York: Columbia University Press. Kinoshita, Sharon, and Peggy McCracken, eds., 2012. Marie de France: A Critical Companion. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Magnani, Roberta, 2014. “Policing the Queer: Narratives of Dissent and Containment in Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale.” Medieval Feminist Forum 50: 90–126. McCracken, Peggy, 1998. The Romance of Adultery: Queenship and Sexual Transgression in Old French Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. McLean, Teresa, 1981. Medieval English Gardens. London: Collins. Morgan, Amy, 2015. “Fairies, Monsters and the Queer Otherworld: Otherness in Sir Orfeo.” MEMSA Journal 1: 45–66. Saunders, Corinne, 1993. The Forest of Medieval Romance: Avernus, Broceliande, Arden. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer. Saunders, Corinne, 2001. Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Tin, Louis-Georges, 2012. The Invention of Heterosexual Culture. London and Cambridge: MIT Press. Tolkien, J. R. R., tr., 1975. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo, ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen and Unwin. Toller, Thomas Northcote, ed., 1898. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary: Based on the Manuscript Collections of the Late Joseph Bosworth. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wright, David, tr., 1985. Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Dressing the Pleasure Garden Creation, Recreation, and Varieties of Pleasure in the Two Texts of the Norwich Grocers’ Play Daisy Black

A visitor to the Metropolitan Cloisters in New York may be forgiven for leaving with the impression that the medieval world was centered on a garden. Set in Fort Tyron Park in Upper Manhattan, the museum houses the medieval collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum building itself performs as an artifact; incorporating parts from four European abbeys disassembled and shipped to New York in the 1930s. The layout of the museum is designed so that, whichever path or corridor you take, you always return to an enclosed garden. These green spaces are curated with as much diligence as the museum’s other exhibits and are landscaped with reference to medieval monastic horticulture. The sweet and bitter smells of herbs, coupled with the sudden shock of bright sunshine, offer a sensual and psychological break from the cool dimness of the main museum buildings. These green spaces within neo-medieval spaces simultaneously offer opportunities for both pleasurable recreation and learning. They are transformative performance spaces: renegotiating and refashioning the European medieval past as a figure of Manhattan identity—but ensuring that, wherever you travel in your research and contemplation, you are always brought back to Eden. As Michael Carter comments, “a trip to The Cloisters is commonly described as a way to be transported to the Middle Ages or—for locals seeking a ‘staycation’—a chance to get out of New York without leaving the city” (Carter 2013; and see Schwembacher’s chapter in this volume). This chapter examines another sensory cultural performance which bases notions of past and present around the figure of the creative, re-creative, and didactic garden. The sixteenth-century Norwich Grocers’ Play is itself an object of historical salvage. No contemporary manuscript of the play survives, though there is evidence for a sequence of twelve biblical plays performed in Norwich to accompany a fair held during Whitsun Week between the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries (for the situating of the pageants during Whitsun week and not, as Alan H. Nelson initially claimed, on Corpus Christi Day, see Dutka 1978, 107–109). Of these twelve, the Norwich Grocers’ Play is the sole survivor, being copied from antiquarian John Kirkpatrick’s now-lost eighteenth-century transcript of an original manuscript (Davis 1970, xxii–xl). The text contains two versions of the

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play. Text A is a ninety-nine-line fragment recorded as being in use in 1533. Text B is a later revision from 1565 containing a complete text, a preface, and two prologues aiming to align the play with the increasingly Protestant theologies of its time: The Storye of the Temptacion of Man in Paradyce, being therin placyd, and the expellynge of Man and Woman from thence, newly renvid and accordynge unto the Skripture, begon thys yere Anno 1565, Anno 7. Eliz. (Davis 1970, Text B, 11–18, ll. 0–1) The variations between the pre- and post-Reformation play texts, which include alternative endings and the later introduction of the allegorical Dolor, Myserye, and a Calvinist Holy Ghost, have been the subject of a number of studies (Mullini 2016; Whitfield-White 2008; Betteridge and Walker 2012, 1–4). Nevertheless, despite their significant structural and theological differences, both texts place a particular emphasis on figuring Eden as, first and foremost, a pleasure garden. The word pleasure and its derivatives appear in numerous forms throughout both versions of the Norwich Grocers’ Play. In Text A, God tells Adam and Eve, “Than my garden of plesure kepe thou suer”; the serpent tells Eve, “Thys tre is plesant withowten refute”; and Eve mimics the serpent’s language when she tells Adam, “Eate therof for thy pleasure” (Davis 1970, Text A, ll. 24, 58, 77). While Text B tends to overshadow the joys of prelapsarian Eden by hinting at what is to come, it contains similarly copious references to “this pleasante garden,” pleasant living and the pleasant tree (Davis 1970, Text B, ll. 3, 31 and 56). This linguistic construction of Eden as a pleasure garden was supported by the material contributions of the guild performing the play. The expenditures recorded in the Norwich Grocer’s Book between 1535–1565 show that these were performances of sensual spectacle that crossed between the playing space of the staged Eden and that of the plays’ spectators (Davis 1970, xxxii–xxxvi; Galloway 1984). The grocers’ guild sought to engage audience senses through the use of perfumes, edible exotic foodstuffs, music, paints, golden masks, and spectacular theatrical tricks. As such, the plays’ constructions of a visually impressive, rich, and sweet-smelling Eden operated as a means of showcasing both the creative skill and the wares of the guild producing them: signaling the pleasure garden’s constructedness as a product of both human and divine creation. Yet while they invited audiences to partake physically and emotionally in the pleasures of performance, not all of the garden’s pleasures should be accessed. Both texts of the play balance the pleasure of creation against the implied dangers of recreation. The multisensory Eden, gifted by God as a “pleasure garden” for Adam, becomes a deceptive and bitter trap for Eve. This, in both texts, is chiefly because the recreation taken by Adam turns pleasure into a dangerous, solitary indulgence for Eve, leaving her exposed to the wiles of the Serpent.

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This chapter examines this transformation and its consequences both for the garden space of Eden and for the ways in which it informs and directs the roles of Adam and Eve. In doing so, it examines the various tensions established between the creation, recreation, and pleasure in the two texts of the Norwich Grocers’ Play. Engaging with recent developments in studies of medieval spectatorship, it first examines the ways the pageants’ pleasure gardens resist enclosure through the use of stage mechanics, spectacle, and smell—arguing that this not only allows the garden’s pleasures to be shared between performers and spectators; it also merges the roles of Adam and Eve as “set-dressers” of God’s garden with that of their grocer players. This kind of sensual engagement also demands that the spectator navigate the knotty moral and pleasurable aspects of the Fall narrative alongside the biblical figures. Second, it interrogates the concept of recreation and what the recreational absence of God and Adam from the playing space does to the status of pleasure in the garden. In doing so, this analysis remains sensitive to changes in theological and secular attitudes toward recreation in the time elapsing between the two texts of the play. Text B’s need to use prologues, to establish tighter parameters through which to justify the recreational and creative pleasure of theater, directs a more misogynist reading of Eve and of the Fall than is evident in the more companionate relationships of the earlier text.

Creation: Material Pleasures Unlike many of the gardens considered in this volume, the Eden of the Norwich pageant is not an enclosed garden. In fact, it is the opposite: an artificial garden space created on an open, raised platform, freely presented to the aural, visual, and olfactory senses of its spectators. The pageant wagon was described in 1565 as “a howse of waynskott paynted and buylded on a carte with fowre whelys” (Davis 1970, xxxv). While the implicit and explicit stage directions of both texts of the Norwich Grocers’ Play indicate an elaborate playing space with several areas in which the play’s figurae are visible to one another at different times, the garden remains the central point of focus for much of the performance and, as such, the most visible (on the players’ movement in and out of the focus, see Butterworth 2014, 37). This visibility goes beyond establishing dramatic focus on certain playing areas. The spiritual pleasures of Eden took a highly material form in the Grocers’ pageant. Guild inventories and accounts between 1535 and 1565 reveal a wealth of objects and devices that aimed to engage in the pleasures of the senses, including the senses of smell, taste, sight, and sound. By far the most prominent (and costly) among the accounts are the items contributing to the spectacular nature of the pageant. During the thirty years spanned by the records, the grocers’ guild spent money on a variety of costumes and wigs; a mask for God; brightly painted cloths “to hang abowte the Pageant”; a fee for those bearing streamers;

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paint (including gold paint for gilding), flowers, and fruits for the garden; and even elaborate cloths “with knopps and tassells” for the horses pulling the pageant (Davis 1970, xxxii–xxxv). All these theatrical elements pertain specifically to the pleasures of sight. This kind of spectacle in the production of religious drama is characteristic of East Anglian dramatic practices, which, as Gail McMurray Gibson (1989) and others have argued, sought to engage an “incarnational aesthetic” through the production of elaborate religious buildings, art, stained glass, and dramatic performances (all while conveniently allaying lay qualms about the worldly riches gained through the wool trade). Nevertheless, such elaborate use of “art” in the production of such narratives also held the potential to draw attention to the pageant’s “artifice,” or nature as a constructed, representative object. For example, the presence of “heare[s],” or wigs, among the stage properties signal that the pageant turned its performers, along with its set, into visibly artificial representations of divine figures. As part of his overarching argument that medieval performers saw themselves as standing in place of, not as the person they were representing, Phillip Butterworth notes that the false beard or wig worked as a partial mask on the medieval stage: The beard helped to symbolise the played personage and disguise the player; it was clearly capable of establishing the identity of the personage and at the same time providing a partial mask to the player. [. . .] the medieval player’s beard was intended to be recognised as false. (Butterworth 2014, 114) Perhaps because of difficulty in their ongoing maintenance through periods in which the pageant had not been annually performed, the grocers’ records show an increase in the number of wigs paid for as the years progressed. While the 1534 account shows charges only for “a new heer with a crown for the Serpent” (Davis 1970, xxxii), the following years feature entries for a crown and hair for the angel, the Griffin-bearer, and, by 1565, hairs for the serpent, Adam, Eve, and “[a] face [mask] and heare for the Father” (ibid., xxxv). This growing attention to costume elements intended to signify the figures’ representative value corresponds with increasing unease about the depiction of divine figures, events, and narratives on stage (AronsonLehavi 2011, 1–15). Through clothing the actors representing God, Eve, Adam, and the serpent in costly, but obviously artificial, hair pieces, the pageant reduced them almost to the same representative status as their artfully painted and decorated pleasure garden. Nevertheless, such means of drawing attention toward the act of representation also operated as an announcement—even advertisement—of the wealth and skill of the guild responsible for producing that representation (see Black 2015). In inviting audiences to take pleasure in their visual artifice, the grocers’ pleasure garden parallels God’s creative acts with those of the guild (on a similar process in the York House Book, see Aronson-Lehavi

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2011, 5). This is particularly the case in the creative act we see the grocers’ God perform on stage: the creation of Eve. Both play texts, along with the mention in the 1565 inventory of “a rybbe coloured red,” suggest that God’s creation of Eve by taking a rib from Adam’s side was performed in front of the audience as an elaborate dramatic spectacle. In Text A, this happens during God’s opening speech: Pater: A rybbe out of mannys syde I do here take; Bothe flesche and bone I do thys creatur blysse; And a woman I fourme, to be his make, Semblable to man; beholde, here she ys. (Davis 1970, Text A, ll. 13–16) This speech directs audience attention to the physical crafting process of forming Eve, “I do here take,” and bids them gaze on the finished “creatur” with the imperative “beholde, here she ys”—suggesting that the actor playing Eve becomes fully visible at this point. This process is similar to that in Text B, which also places stresses on the words behold, creature, and, on the making process, “behold I do the make” (Davis 1970, Text B, ll. 11–13). These passages attest to the highly visual nature of the scene, as attention is repeatedly drawn to God’s performance of a theatrical magic trick. They also encourage the audience, like Adam, to draw pleasure from the act of creation and from the spectacle it and the created object provide. From her first appearance, the audience is therefore encouraged to read Eve as one of Eden’s created pleasures. This not only anticipates Eve’s movement from created object of pleasure to illicit consumer of created pleasures; it also implicates the spectator in Eve’s narrative by underlining their own role as consumers of visual pleasures. This process is supported by the pageant’s engagement of its spectators’ other senses in the construction of Eden as a pleasure garden. The records of the Norwich Grocers’ Book suggest that the pageant sought to establish a theatrical contract with their spectators even before any visual or aural encounter with the pageant through the sense of smell (Butterworth 2014, 78). The records suggest that an abundance of smells accompanied the Eden pageant as it progressed through the streets of Norwich. Several of these are mentioned in relation to the “Griffin,” an incense-burning, gilded figure that appears to have been placed on top of the pageant. Incense, or perfume, is one of the most common sources of expenditure in the surviving accounts. The position of the Griffin is taken from the entry for 1563, which says, “A Gryffon, fylte, with a fane to sett on the sayde toppe [of the pageant].” It is not clear, however, whether this is the incense-burning Griffin mentioned in the earlier records. An entry from 1534 shows a payment of 6d. for “fumygacions”; in 1546 “datys, almondys, and perfumes for the Gryffin” are listed; in 1556 the large sum of 20d. was paid “for perfumys for the procession” and 1557 saw the purchase of 6oz of perfume, including “notmyggys,

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clows, macys [nutmegs, cloves, and mace].” The 1557 accounts suggest that scent was also a consideration in the visual set-dressing of this pleasure garden, with payments made for colored thread “to bynd the flowers” (Davis 1970, xxxii–xxxv). Heavy scents are particularly appropriate for this pageant. The Eden of medieval spiritual literature is a highly aromatic place (see for example the discussion of the highly scented, flourishing garden and feminine fecundity in the visions of Hildegard of Bingen in McAvoy 2015, 50). Visionary literature depicts the garden as a place full of fragrant flowers (particularly the Marian flowers of the lily and the rose, on which see Tyers in this volume). In other accounts, the smells of Eden offer immortality to Adam and Eve, and the Tree of Life emits a perfume that halts natural decay (Prest 1981, 16, 29). These scents also referenced gardens rather closer to home. Carole Rawcliffe has noted that sixteenth-century Norwich was famous for its medicinal herb gardens, many of which “sought to delight the senses of smell and sight (visus et odoratus) and, thus, to promote health and contentment” (Rawcliffe 2008, 4). She argues that sweet-smelling medicinal gardens were also associated with the diverse trades held within grocers’ guilds, and the grocers’ Company of London kept a lavishly stocked garden of lavender, roses, thyme, and pinks for the benefit of their apothecary members (ibid., 12). For a company of grocers, such working gardens interwove medicinal and pecuniary benefits with opportunities for healthful pleasure and spiritual reflection. Given the grocers’ role in importing foreign goods, it is unsurprising that the Norwich pageant should combine local flowers with exotic spices in forming its Eden scentscape. The burning of perfumes in the Norwich grocers’ pageant would have influenced the way in which spectators experienced both the represented Eden and their own civic space. If incense was carried before the pageant, then spectators would likely have encountered the smells of Eden before they could sample its visual pleasures. An incense-burning Griffin placed on the roof of the pageant would have given the impression that the garden itself was emitting a sweet smell, bleeding into and, crucially, transforming the lay street space into a space of sacred delight. Finally, this scent would have lingered after the pageant had passed—potentially coloring the next activity to take place in that space with the fading aura of Eden. In filling a civic space with incense, the grocers’ pageant therefore temporarily recasts that space as a sacred space (Hill-Vàsquez 2007). Bringing the scented pleasures of the garden to the streets, it physically brings the audience into Eden and maintains that space as Eden long after the expulsion of Adam and Eve. In this, interpretations and meanings of smell in the pageant are less easily delineated than the carefully constructed artifice of set and costume. While visual elements may be amplified in order to signal their constructedness, the smells of the pageant are genuine. They cannot represent anything other than themselves: the scent of garden flowers really does come from the flowers adorning the pageant. The burning of incense in “play”

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reproduces the smells widely used in the “earnest” business of church liturgy—therefore transposing the associations and meanings of that sacred space to that of the civic street. This kind of transposition is attacked in the fifteenth-century antitheatrical tract, the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, which argues that performances of religious narratives “takun in bourde and pley the most ernestful workis of God” (Davidson 1993, 94, ll. 45–47). These smells are really there, and really experienced, and not one thing being used to signify another. In this manner, they demand a more complex response, as they collapse the spaces of spectator and performer with a directness that visual elements—composed of edges, boundaries, and hierarchies of spectator and object-of-gaze—do not match. While the smells announced to their audience that they were in the proximity of Eden, they were also designed to evoke the sense of taste. Roasting nutmegs, cloves, and mace—all spices imported by the grocers’ guild and widely used in aristocratic medieval cooking—would have created a rich culinary scent that may well have made the audience feel hungry (Scully 1995, 83–86). They would have been aided in this process by the edible set dressing of “orengys, fygys, allmondys, dates, reysens, preumes, and aples” used to garnish Eden’s tree (Davis 1970, xxxii–xxxv). Given that only apples are mentioned as being consumed within the play, it seems that these additional edible set-dressings were designed to help the audience experience for themselves Eve’s temptation concerning the garden’s forbidden pleasures. This could potentially have gone beyond mere sensual temptation. In their recent review of medieval spectatorship, Greg Walker and John McGavin consider neurological studies that observe that a monkey watching another monkey eating a banana conducted the same neurological processes as the monkey performing the act of eating. Walker and McGavin consequently argue that mirror neurons perform similar roles in evoking sympathies between audiences and performers: [. . . T]he eating of a banana also allows us to mirror others’ emotions and intentions, to sense their pain or pleasure, anger or fear by spontaneously, viscerally “resonating” with their physical responses to those feelings in our bodies’ own motor system, without even knowing that we are doing so on a conscious level. (Walker and McGavin 2016, 44) Just as cinema advertisers have long known that depictions of people eating and drinking before a film, combined with the smell of popcorn filling the foyer as they enter, are likely to increase their food sales, so the medieval grocers’ audience would have been particularly primed to experience salivation at the sight of Eve eating the apple by the number of exotic, culinary smells accompanying the pageant. Again this produced a tangible and physical, rather than representative, response to a performed biblical act. While this might have encouraged the Norwich audience to take a more

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sympathetic view of Eve—they are, after all, susceptible to the same sin— they may therefore also have performed alongside Eve by succumbing to the pageant’s sensory, serpent-like duplicity. Conveniently, goods such as apples could have been procured by audience members at a (less costly) price at one of the numerous outlets selling food during the city’s Whitsun fairs and alongside the performance of pageants (Dutka 1978, 107–108). The collective effect of this sensual engagement allowed the pageant’s performance of the garden and its pleasures to move beyond the playing space of the pageant wagon and allow—or at the very least tempt—the audience to interact with them. This, moreover, would have created a strong cognitive link between the rich pleasures offered in Eden and the trade of the Grocers, who sponsored the play. The expense of putting on the pageants is testified in a record from 1527, in which Norwich’s Luke’s Guild, which at the time had sole responsibility for the performances, complained of the near-ruinous cost of performing them and asked that responsibility be split between the city’s guilds. In doing so, they argued that the pageants formed one of the biggest commercial attractions to the city in the year because of its opportunities for trade: the sight of which disguisings and pageauntes [. . .] is so coveted specially by the people of the countré, by force wherof yerly at the tyme more than any other tyme of the yere the people of the countré haue abundantly vsed to resorte to the said Citie, by reason of which resorte of people as well many merchaundises as vitaille by the citezens and inhabitauntes withyn the said Citie yerly more at that tyme than eny othe tyme in the yere arn vttered and sold. (Davis 1970, xxvii, emphasis mine) The fact that the Norwich grocers went to such elaborate lengths to dress their set, and that they carefully included items from their own merchandise, suggests that they hoped their audience might see and smell the garden’s figs, dates, almonds, oranges, and apples and succumb to a little temptation themselves. Their spectacularly dressed and scented pageant therefore consolidated links between the divine pleasures of Eden and the worldly pleasures and goods imported and sold through the guild’s labor. This link between the theatrical creativity of grocers and the Eden is further consolidated through the roles of Adam and Eve, who, in Text B, are referred to as “dressers” of the garden: God:

. . . of thys pleasante garden that I have plant most goodlye I wyll hym make the dresser for his good recreacion. (Davis 1970, Text B, ll. 3–4)

Their prelapsarian work tending the garden is thus conflated with the postlapsarian work of the grocers. Adam and Eve’s role as “dressers” of their

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wagon-garden references both their participation in the creation of the dramatic spectacle and the grocers’ guild’s ongoing performance of the roles of the fallen Adam and Eve. The grocers’ Eden is therefore simultaneously a place to find pleasure in and a place to work in: a site of creation and recreation.

Recreation: The Dangers of Solitary Pleasures The Grocers’ Play therefore offered both its inhabitants and audience an abundance of multisensory pleasures that extended beyond the garden represented on the pageant and temporarily transformed the spectators’ space within Norwich’s streets into Eden. As a consequence, the Norwich audience inhabited this pleasure garden along with Adam and Eve—even to the extent of being tempted to partake of the garden’s edible nature. However, between God’s creation of Eve and the Fall, the pleasures of the garden assume a less benevolent aspect. This occurs, not when God places a restriction on the ways Adam and Eve were to sample the delights of Eden but, rather, when the two humans separate to pursue recreation independently of one another. There are two moments of leave-taking in each of the two versions of the play: when God leaves the playing area and when Adam leaves his wife. Text A has God refer twice to a physical place of habitation which is spatially distinct from Eden. This is shown by two implicit stage directions: “In the hevenly empery I am resydent” and “Into Paradyce I wyll nowe descende”—which suggest the pageant contained two spaces to signify heaven and paradise, likely demarcated by height (thus requiring God to descend; Davis 1970, Text A, ll. 2 and 9). God later says he will return to his original position after creating Eve: God: Here I leve the, to have experyens, To use thys place in vertuse occupacion. For nore I wyll retorne to myn habitacion. (ibid., ll. 45–7) This identification of specific places within the playing space disrupts the sensory blurring between the space of the pleasure garden and that of the spectator by demarcating boundaries within those spaces (on the importance of this process, see Dox 2000, 175). Moreover, God’s specificity concerning these places and his movement between them also raises a series of troubling questions from the perspective of the Fall narrative. The first is the obvious paradox concerning whether it can be possible for an omnipotent God to “leve” any place, let alone paradise. Second, God’s absence threatens to change the moral status of paradise. If God is absent from his pleasure garden, what happens to the pleasures in that garden—are pleasures, experienced apart from God, no longer uncomplicatedly innocent?

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This question is particularly pertinent to the later performances of the pageant, as if this is the case, Adam and Eve, like the playgoers in the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, were in danger of enjoying a sensory spectacle without spiritual substance (Davidson 1993, 99, ll. 186–229). This appears to be the case in Text A, as God’s departure heralds the breakdown in communication and labor between the human couple God designed “[t]o assyst us in owr worke” (Davis 1970, Text A, l. 11). Directly before God takes his leave of Adam, he warns him about the “tre of connyng,” commanding, God:

Showe thys to thy spowse nowe bye and bye. I shall me absent for a tyme and space; who can yt denye? I make the lord thereof; kepe wyll my place (ibid., ll. 34–37)

Following Adam’s confirmation of his obedience, God leaves the playing area, saying, “Here I leve the, to have experyens, / To use thys place in vertuse occupacion” (ibid., ll. 45–6). God’s leaving therefore gives Adam several duties to perform: to show the tree to his spouse, to “kepe wyll my place” (i.e., to continue God’s work in the garden), and to use the place in virtuous occupations. However, as soon as God leaves, Adam abandons all three tasks. There is no evidence in Text A that he has made any mention of the tree to Eve or, indeed, shown it to her. It is implied from Eve’s later speech that she is aware of God’s injunction—potentially a wry reflection on the fact that, given the small space of the pageant, she could not help but overhear Adam and God’s dialogue—however, she does not learn this from Adam. This omission is important as it situates the first act of disobedience in the Garden of Eden with Adam, not with Eve. Moreover, Adam’s speech following God’s exit hints at further forms of disobedience directly: Adam:

O lovely spowse of Godes creacion, I leve the here alone, I shall not tary longe, For I wyll walk a whyle for my recreacion And se over Paradyce, that ys so stronge. Nothyng may hurt us nor do vs wronge; God ys owr protectour and soverayn guyde; In thys place non yll thing may abyde (ibid., ll. 48–54)

Here, Adam introduces the first untruth to the garden: “nothyng may hurt us nor do us wronge.” Not only does he fail to show Eve the tree; he also implies to her that there is nothing in Eden that can harm them. This leaves her unequipped to answer the lies of the serpent.

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The first duty of Adam and Eve is to engage in the work of the garden and to reproduce God’s role as set-dressers by looking after it. Adam, however, abandons this work, telling Eve, “I wyll walk a whyle for my recreacion.” This speech draws particular attention to “recreacion” by using it to pun on the first line of Adam’s speech to Eve, “lovely spowse of Godes creacioun.” This paralleling of “creation” with “recreation” marks a shift in the pleasure dynamics of the play. While the creative elements involved in forming God’s “pleasure garden” suggest activity, “recreation” was more commonly associated with spiritual or bodily refreshment and personal amusement or diversion (see recreāciǒun [n.], Middle English Dictionary 2013). The ability of the medieval pleasure garden to effect spiritual and bodily healing makes Eden a particularly good place for Adam to find personal refreshment (Rawcliffe 2008; Meyvaert 1986). However, if the term’s second role as an “amusement, a diversion or pleasurable pastime” is taken into account, Adam’s desire to “walk a whyle” assumes a less positive purpose. At the time of Text A’s production (and even more so by the revised 1565 text B), the morality of “recreation” was being increasingly contested. The Tretise of Miraclis Pleying makes the poor use of recreation one of their primary sources of ammunition against the performance of biblical drama: Any yif men axen what recreacioun men shulden have on the haliday after theire holy contemplacion in the chirche, we seyen to hem two thingis—oon, that yif he hadde verily ocupiede him in contemplacioun byforn, neither he wold aske that question ne han wille to se vanite; another we seyn, that his recreacious shulde ben in the werkis of mercy to his neiebore and in diliting him in alle good cominicacion with his beibore, as biforn he dilited him in God, and in alle othere nedeful werkis that reason and kinde axen. And if men ask what recreation men should have on the holy day after their holy contemplation in the church, we say to them two things— one, that if he had indeed occupied himself in contemplation before, neither would he ask that question nor have any desire to see vanities; another we say, that his recreation should be in the works of mercy to his neighbor and in delighting himself in all good communication with his neighbor, as before he delighted himself in God, and in all other useful works that reason and nature ask. (Davidson 1993, ll. 363–372. Translation mine) Similar criticisms continued to form the underlying argument of antitheatrical tracts throughout the late sixteenth century (see Field 1583; Rankins 1587; Stubbes 1583). Indeed, they also became subject matter for theater itself, which increasingly defended its status by claiming didactic rather than recreational purposes—often by voicing their own condemnations of pleasurable recreation. For example, in the 1470s morality play Mankind, the

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central figure is tempted, along with his audience, to indulge in a number of recreational sins, including singing bawdy songs, frequenting taverns, and abandoning his spade in order to sleep (Eccles 1969, 216–228). Distraction from his God-ordained task results in mankind’s fall in the morality play. However, the Norwich Adam’s abandonment of his task is not even prompted by external temptation. While Mankind is subject to a barrage of discouragement, lies, and coercion before he lays down his spade, Adam, like a disloyal apprentice, abandons his tasks as soon as he believes himself out of the view of his master (see Beadle 1982, 83–90, on the apprentice– master relationship in the larger civic religious dramas). Having Adam announce that he is planning to walk around Paradise “for his recreation” therefore takes on a particularly subversive quality. In temporarily leaving his wife, Adam swaps creative acts for recreative acts and acts in defiance of God’s opening speech, which claims that “Yt ys not semely for man, sine adjutorio, / To be allone, nor very convenyent” (Davis 1970, Text A, ll. 3–4). The fact that the first speech Adam directs to Eve (as opposed to speaking about her) is the speech in which he takes his leave reemphasizes this sense of dramatic uneasiness about his “recreation”: Adam has neither been tending the garden nor been with Eve for long enough to possibly require recreative space away from either. Elaine McKay and Alex Ryrie have noted that concept of recreation changed as the sixteenth century progressed, suggesting that it was considered Godly only when used as “regeneration.” Any other kind of passing time was considered sinful, as it was wrong to “while away the time that God had given you” (McKay 2008, 61–63; Ryrie 2013, 445). This increasing cultural unease concerning recreation is reflected in the 1565 version of the Grocers’ Play. The Adam of Text B leaves Eve alone on even less substantial grounds, telling her, Adam:

To walke abowt this garden my fantasye me meve; I wyll the leave alone tyll that I turne ageyne; Farewell, myn owne swete spouse, I leave the to remayne. (Davis 1970, Text B, ll. 32–34)

Here, the earlier “recreation”—which held the potential for Adam’s departure to be read as having some positive spiritual benefit—is replaced by the even more ambiguous word fantasye. “Fantasy” was classified as one of the mental faculties involved in forming delusive ideas and was a word used to describe “an artistic or artful creation,” untruths, a preference directed by caprice, rather than reason (see fantasīe [n.] Middle English Dictionary 2013). Adam appears to frame his walk around the garden to exercise his “fantasye” as part of the creative process, that is, using the garden for imaginative and contemplative purposes. This reflects some of the medieval arguments for planting monastic gardens to be places of spiritual, bodily and mental healing—places that, as Carole Rawcliffe has argued,

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“offer tranquil space for meditation upon man’s fallen nature” (2008, 6). For the Norwich Adam, however, this opportunity to reflect—on past and future, and on the Fall—is untimely. His walk around Eden occurs before he, a relatively new creation with no concept of death or decay—has the capacity to reflect on past and future, and while the Fall has yet to happen. Unknown to Adam, his walk prefigures God’s own walking the garden after the Fall (Genesis 3.8). Adam’s act of creative recreation therefore threatens to impinge on the role of the Divine creator even before Eve has encountered the serpent. The other definitions of fantasye yield more negative readings of Adam’s desire to separate from Eve, suggesting that he engages in unproductive, capricious contemplation. Again, this performs a prefiguring function: the association of “fantasye” with self-delusion, falsehood, and untruth anticipates the half-truths and lies with which the serpent seduces Eve. It also reflects back on the fantasy creation of the grocers’ own stagecraft and their formation of “an artistic or artful creation” to engage the senses of their audience in what is essentially a collective act of delusion which continues for the duration of the pageant. While Butterworth refers to this collective act as the “agreed pretence” between performer and spectator, Walker and McGavin have contested the idea that such pretence operates in the same way for each individual member of a collective audience (Butterworth 2014, 1; Walker and McGavin 2016). Where the 1533 play uses the word recreation in a manner which could yield more neutral readings, Text B’s substitution of it with fantasye troubles both the way Adam chooses to spend his first few minutes alone with his wife in Eden and, by extension, aligns his behavior with the way the (fallen) audience are choosing to spend their recreation time in enjoying a staged “fantasye.” Adam’s wish for solitude actively circumvents God’s desire that he not be alone. Curiously, this is the gendered reversal of the situation in Milton’s 1667 telling of the Fall in Paradise Lost, in which it is Eve who expresses her desire to work apart from Adam (Milton 2003, ll. 205–385). The willful division of the Norwich Adam from both his labor and his wife—two key patriarchal signifiers—forms an unusual subtext encouraging its audience to rethink debates concerning agency and blame in the Fall. While Eve succumbs to the serpent’s temptation, the first acts of disobedience in the Norwich Eden reside with Adam. This sharing of agency is consistent with the overriding sense of mutuality between the couple in the Norwich Grocers’ Play. Both texts show a more loving, companionate relationship between the couple than is usually seen in late medieval dramatizations of the Fall, and Text B is particularly unusual in that it shows this love enduring after the Fall. Unusually, Adam continues to address Eve with living endearments such as “myn owne sweteharte,” and the couple seek to comfort one another, with Eve stressing their mutuality: “I am even as ye ar, who so ever me

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bafall” (Davis 1970, Text B, ll. 103–161). While the Adam and Eve of the N-Town, York, Towneley, and Chester cycles all argue, blame, and, in the case of N-Town, even threaten to kill one another in their bitterness over the expulsion, the Norwich Adam and Eve instead offer one another words of comfort and reconciliation. This may reflect the movement towards a more companionate model of marriage recently identified by Nicole Nolan Sidhu as existing between dramatic figures such as Noah and his wife (Sidhu 2016, 188–228). Nevertheless, Adam’s absence turns Paradise into a dangerous place for Eve. Eve’s temptation is both origin and partaker of a long literary tradition that suggests that women left alone in spaces are vulnerable to interference. As other chapters in this volume show, female characters in romances who fall asleep in gardens or natural spaces often find themselves stolen away or attacked by supernatural forces (see Morgan in this volume). This trope also appears in medieval retellings of religious narratives and is particularly evident in the dramas of East Anglia. Here, the Fall narrative is sometimes reversed, as the supernatural interference works for good. The N-Town Joseph leaves his new wife in her “little praty house” while he exits the stage (for work, not for recreation in this case). He returns home to find the door locked and Mary pregnant (Spector 1991, 124–130). In the Digby Mary Magdalen, the seduced and sinning protagonist lays down in an arbor to await the arrival of her lovers— only to dream of an angel who exhorts her to repent (Baker, Murphy and Hall 1982, 24–95). Joanne Findon has argued that the Magdalen’s horticultural conversion performs the romance trope in reverse: she awaits a supernatural lover and instead has her faith renewed and virginity restored (Findon 2006). In both texts of the Norwich Grocers’ Play, however, Eve’s solitude alters both her place in the garden and the status of the pleasures within it. Because Adam has represented Eden as a place which contains nothing that can harm them, Eve is unprepared for the serpent’s deception, and can only read it as, like the garden’s horticultural pleasures, coming from God. From this point, the pleasures of paradise become dangerous, untrustworthy, and difficult to decipher. Where the beautiful sights, smells and tastes at the pageants’ openings operated as a celebration of both God’s and the grocers’ creativity, they now become unreliable signifiers. This change in the presentation of pleasure in Eden is dealt with slightly differently in the two texts. In Text A, the serpent draws attention to the “plesent” tree of knowledge: Serpens:

O gemme of felicyté and femynyne love, Why hathe God under precept prohybyte thys frute, That ye shuld not ete therof to your behofe? Thys tre ys plesant withowten refute. (Davis 1970, Text A, ll. 55–58)

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When Eve answers that God has commanded them not to touch it for they will die, the Serpent responds: Serpens:

Eate of thys apple at my requeste. To the Almyghty God dyd me send. (ibid., ll. 67–68)

The serpent’s lie commands a deceptive subtlety that Eve, in her prelapsarian state, cannot identify—the devil is indeed sent from (as in, away from) God in his banishment, but he has not been sent to Eden. The efficacy of this deception is testified in Eve’s own speech. Passing an apple to Adam, she stresses the pleasures of eating the fruit, adding the extra detail that it was given to her by “an angell”: Eva:

An angell cam from Godes grace And gaffe me an apple of thys tre, Part therof I geffe to the; Eate thereof for thy pleasure, For thys frute ys Godes own treasure. (ibid., ll. 74–78)

Eve’s description of the serpent as “angel” refers to the disguise the serpent is wearing. As discussed earlier, the grocers’ inventories show the 1534 commissioning of “a new heer [wig], with a crown for the Serpent” at the cost of 6d. The use of the wig and crown suggest that the serpent would have been figured to resemble the iconographical tradition which depicted Eve’s tempter with the angelic face of a young woman (on which see Muir 1995, 69; Black 2014). In this manner, the serpent’s beauty becomes a trap for Eve: she believes his words, first because she has not been taught to expect any evil in Eden and, second, because things of beauty in God’s pleasure garden have hitherto always been divine in nature. In this moment, the visual signifiers crafted to delight and give pleasure are revealed to be untrustworthy. A golden crown and wig may as easily signify the devil as an angel. The Eve of Text B is in many ways presented as more culpable than her earlier counterpart. Consistent with later dramatic conventions, Text B features two prologues outlining and defending their subject matter: one to be played as a stand-alone performance and the other to be played as part of a series of pageants (Davis 1970, 11–12). The two prologues of Text B seek to establish tighter parameters through which to justify the pleasure of theater. The first of these takes pains to stress the fact that it is very much performing a revival of an earlier dramatic form: Prolocutor:

Lyke as yt chancyd befor this season, Owt of Godes scripture revealed in playes Was dyvers stories sett furth by reason

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Of pageants apparellyd in Whittson dayes; And lately to be fal[l]en into decayes; Which stories dependyd in theyr orders sett By severall devices, much knowledge to get. (Just as it happened before this time Out of God’s scripture revealed in plays Were various stories set forth by reason Of dressed pageants on Whitsun days: And recently fallen into decay; Which stories parts in their orders set by several devices, much knowledge to get.) (Davis 1970, Text B, First Prologue, ll. 1–7. Translation mine) This prologue draws attention to the artificiality of the earlier pageants— their employment of “severall devices” (devices being a term used for stage machinery as well as literary mechanics) and their susceptibility to “decay” (a word which reflects both social and physical decline)—while nevertheless defending their legitimacy as a spiritual practice. These plays, it claims, revealed God’s scripture and were the product of the cognitive contemplation of spiritual matters “sett furth by reason” in order to act as effective agents of knowledge. This new focus on knowledge and reason, as opposed to sensual and spectacular experience, also supports a shift in the way in which Eve is represented in the play. The first prologue suggests that Eve’s error is one of understanding, claiming “woman was deceived with the Serpentes darkned myste” (ibid., l. 24). This description of the Serpent’s deceit as a “mist” reflects the ways the temptation scene shifts the boundaries between visual pleasures and error— neither Eve nor her audience can trust the judgment of their senses. The alternative prologue extends this by placing a far heavier responsibility for the Fall on Eve than is supported either in the body of Text A or in the following Text B pageant, claiming that it was “[t]he woman, beinge weakest, that cawsed man to tast” (Davis 1970, Text B, Alternative Prologue, l. 16). This highlights a fundamental difference between Adam and Eve that is not necessarily present in the rest of the pageant material of Text B but that suggests a narrowing of gender roles even as the prologues seek to exert increased control over the definition of meaning in the pageant. This is, in part, because of the B prologues’ need to justify the pageants’ creative existence against a cultural backdrop showing mistrust of sensory engagement and which was increasingly figuring religious pageants as the decaying curiosities of the past. As a consequence, Text B places far more emphasis than Text A on the untrustworthy nature of the senses. The serpent explains to his audience that he will show himself as “an angell of lyght,” and he aims to deceive Eve’s ears through adopting a “voyce so small” (Davis 1970, Text B, ll. 40, 42; and on this scene Harty 1981, 86). Taste is also undermined,

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as the fruit of the “plesante” tree is revealed to be bitter. These multilayered deceptions call into question the entire system of pleasure in the Norwich God’s garden. One by one, pleasures experienced through the senses—sight, sound, taste, smell—are shown to be untrustworthy.

The Fall: Displeasure Pleasure also becomes displeasure. In an episode unique to Norwich Text B, Adam and Eve are accompanied out of Eden by the allegorical play figures Dolor (sorrow) and Myserye, who introduce themselves and the couple’s punishment through the language of consumption: Dolor:

Myserye:

Cum furth, O Man, take hold of me! Through envy hast lost thy heavenly light By eatinge; in bondage from hence shall be. Now must you me, Dolor, have allways in sight. And also of me, Myserye, thou must taste and byte Of hardnes and of colde and eke of infirmitie; Accordinge to desarte thy portion is, of right, To enjoy that in me that is withoute certeyne. (Davis 1970, Text B, ll. 111–118)

The language of Dolor and Myserye represents the decay of sensual pleasures, and constitutes a reversal of the sensory, edible, theatrical pleasure dynamic established by God’s garden at the beginning of the pageant. Eating has become bondage; the bitten fruit misery; the pleasurable sights of the garden replaced with the constant “sight” of Dolor. Even the sense of touch encounters hardness and coldness. In the moments before the Fall, the pleasures of Eden are tarnished by being associated with the worldly and the deceptive. After the Fall, all sensual pleasures are suspect. In Text A, this message is underlined by Adam and Eve’s lament as they are driven from Paradise. The central source of their woe is their reversal in fortune: Adam: Eve:

By owr fowle presumpsyon we are cast full deepe, Fro pleasur to payn, with carys manyefold. With wonderous woo, alas! it pcane not be told; Fro Paradyse to ponyschment and bondage full strong. (Davis 1970, Text A, ll. 83–86)

This reversal of “pleasure to payn” and “paradyse to ponyschment” leaves the pair entering a bleak world that functions as the reversal of God’s “garden of pleasure”—reminding their audience that this earthly world, full of transient, untrustworthy, theatrical pleasures, stands in the same state. In Text B, God gives Adam and Eve leather aprons to wear as they are

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expelled from Eden: “Beholde, theis letherin aprons unto yourselves now take” (Davis 1970, Text B, l. 94). These dull leather aprons would have also functioned as a reference to the grocers’ guild, whose labors to create the sensually enticing spectacle of the pageant were, after all, not equivalent to the creative forces of God but constituted a part of the labor forming Adam’s punishment. Text B ends on a more redemptive note than Text A. In a unique episode, Adam and Eve are presented with a message of hope in the form of the Holy Ghost, who tells them the taste they have had of sorrow “[i]s nott in respect, layd up in store, / To the joys for the that ever shall last” (ibid., ll. 125–6). Verbally replacing the leather apron costumes marking the Fall with the “brest-plate of rightousnes” and the “shylde of faythe,” the Holy Ghost enables Adam to proclaim the distinctly Calvinist idea that “Deth is overcum by forepredestinacion” and to end the play with a lively song (ibid., ll. 139–61). This anachronistic ending, with its introduction of music to the play, implies that the corrupting and deceitful nature of sensual pleasures may well be overcome—as long as they are in alignment with the theological doctrines of the new faith. The ending also introduces a more redemptive form of sensual communion between performer and audience. Sound, like smell, has the ability to blur spectatorial-performance boundaries and move beyond the immediate space of the pageant wagon. Music is used rather differently between Texts A and B of the Norwich Grocers’ pageant. In Text A, Adam and Eve’s lament is repeated to music as they walk “about the place”: And so thei xall syng, walking together about the place, wryngyng ther hands. Wythe dolorous sorrowe, we maye wayle and wepe Both nyght and daye in sory sythys full depe. B.B. These last 2 lines set to musick twice over an again, for a chorus of 4 pts. (Davis 1970, Text A, ll. 89–91) In Text B, their voices join with others (“Tenor, Medius, Bass”), in joyful praise (Davis 1970, Text B, l. 153). This not only signals the changed theology of the later text; it also moves from the individual, specific lament of Adam and Eve in Text A to the collectively experienced celebration of salvation in Text B. Although the audience-invading sensual pleasures of sight, taste, and smell are mistrusted in Text B, the use of sound generates new opportunities for player–spectator communion. While the introduction of the Holy Ghost to the 1565 Text B constituted an attempt to rework and reassimilate the material and theatrical culture of the grocers’ pageant, the bid to refashion the Grocers’ Play as a Protestant

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narrative “newly renvid and accordynge to Skripture” did not last. The last recorded performance of the play was in the same year, 1565, and later records note that the Pageante was sett out in the street and so remained at the Black Fryers byrdge in open street, when bothe yt was so weather beaten that the chiefe parte was roton. (quoted in Davis 1970, xxxvi) When nobody would buy the pageant for the sum of 20s, it remained in the street “nowe one piece thereof rent of and now another” until it was eventually taken to pieces by the mayor’s officer. The public decay of the pageant that had taken so much of the grocers’ skill, money, and stagecraft to construct is perhaps one of the strongest testimonies to the transience of the worldly pleasure garden. The very site of creation, pleasure, and performance was divorced from the narrative it signified, becoming mere decaying matter. In an article for Medieval Feminist Forum’s special edition on the enclosed garden, Liz McAvoy argued that . . . we must also remember that the hortus conclusus was simultaneously a physical, visual, tactile and ludic arena within which all types of cultural performances were played out. (McAvoy 2014, 8) It is not possible, however, to stage an enclosed garden. Indeed, any garden depicted on a pageant has to resist enclosure for the pleasures it offers to have any dramatic effect. It is precisely the fact that the Eden of the Norwich Grocers’ Play is not a hortus conclusus—but rather a space that resists enclosure—that enables it to perform as a physical, visual, tactile, and ludic arena. Through seeking to engage, and even ensnare, the senses of their spectators with Eden’s pleasure garden, the two texts of the Norwich Grocers’ Play problematize the Fall narrative in a manner that produces some surprisingly sympathetic readings. The spectator, alongside Adam and Eve, is exposed to the pleasurable, barely out of reach temptations presented by the tree of real, edible fruits dressing the garden. Yet as they take pleasure in the gardens’ creativity, they are reminded of the dangers of recreation in a world in which even the delights of God’s own “pleasure garden” have the ability to leave a bitter taste.

Bibliography Aronson-Lehavi, Sharon, 2011. Street Scenes: Late Medieval Acting and Performance. Chippenham: Palgrave Macmillan. Baker, Donald C., John L. Murphy, and Louis B. Hall, eds., 1982. “Mary Magdalen.” In The Late Medieval Religious Plays of Bodleian MSS Digby 133 and E Museo 160. EETS, e.s. 283. London: Oxford University Press.

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Beadle, Richard, ed., 1982. “The Building of the Ark.” In The York Plays. Bungay: Edward Arnold Publishers Ltd. Betteridge, Thomas, and Greg Walker, eds., 2012. The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Black, Daisy, 2014. “The Time of the Tree: Returning to Eden after the Fall in the Cornish Creation of the World.” Medieval Feminist Forum 50.1: 61–89. Black, Daisy, 2015. “‘Nayles Large and Lang’: Masculine Identity and the Anachronic Object in the York Crucifixion Play.” Medieval Feminist Forum 50.2: 85–104. Butterworth, Phillip, 2014. Staging Conventions in Medieval English Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carter, Michael, 2013. “The Cloisters in Popular Culture: ‘Time in This Place Does Not Obey an Order’”. www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/ features/2013/cloisters-in-popular-culture [Accessed 29 November, 2016]. Davidson, Clifford, ed., 1993. “A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge.” In Early Drama, Art and Music Monograph Series, 19. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval institute Publications. Davis, Norman, ed., 1970. Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments. EETS, s.s. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dox, Donnalee, 2000. “Theatrical Space, Mutable Space, and the Space of Imagination: Three Readings of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament.” In Medieval Practices of Space, edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka, 167–198. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dutka, Jo-Anna, 1978. “Mystery Plays at Norwich: Their Formation and Development.” Leeds Studies in English 10: 107–120. Eccles, Mark, ed., 1969. “Mankind.” In The Macro Plays. EETS, o.s. 262. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Field, John, 1583. A Godly Exhortation. Early English Books Online. http://quod. lib.umich.edu/e/eebo2/B07675.0001.001?view=toc Findon, Joanne, 2006. “Napping in the Arbour in the Digby Mary Magdalen Play.” Early Theatre 9.2: 35–55. Galloway, David, ed., 1984. Records of Early English Drama: Norwich 1540–1642. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gibson, Gail McMurray, 1989. The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harty, Kevin, 1981. “The Norwich Grocers’ Play and Its Three Cyclic Counterparts: Four English Mystery Plays on the Fall of Man.” Studia Neophilologica 53.1: 77–89. Hill-Vàsquez, Heather, 2007. Sacred Players: The Politics of Response in the Middle English Religious Drama. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. McAvoy, Liz Herbert, 2014. “The Medieval Hortus Conclusus: Revisiting the Pleasure Garden.” Medieval Feminist Forum 50.1: 5–10. McAvoy, Liz Herbert, 2015. “‘Flourish Like a Garden’: Pain, Purgatory and Salvation in the Writing of Medieval Religious Women.” Medieval Feminist Forum 50.1: 33–60. McKay, Elaine, 2008. “‘For Refreshment and Preservinge Health’: The Definition and Function of Recreation in Early Modern England.” Historical Research 81.211: 53–74. Meyvaert, Paul, 1986. “The Medieval Monastic Garden.” In Medieval Gardens, edited by Elizabeth MacDougall, 25–53. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks. Middle English Dictionary, 2013. At https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/ Milton, John, 2003. Paradise Lost. St Ives: Penguin Books Ltd. Muir, Lynette R., 1995. The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Mullini, Roberta, 2016. “The Norwich Grocers’ Play(s) (1533, 1565): Development and Changes in the Representation of Man’s Fall.” In Staging Scripture: Biblical Drama, 1350–1600, edited by Peter Happé, 125–148. Leiden and Boston: Brill-Rodolphi. Prest, John, 1981. The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-Creation of Paradise. London: Yale University Press. Rankins, William, 1587. A Mirror of Monsters. Early English Books Online. http:// quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A10414.0001.001?view=toc Rawcliffe, Carole, 2008. “Delectable Sightes and Fragrant Smelles: Gardens and Health in Late Medieval and Early Modern England.” Garden History 36.1: 3–21. Ryrie, Alec, 2013. Being Protestant in Reformation Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scully, Terence, 1995. The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. Sidhu, Nicole Nolan, 2016. Indecent Exposure: Gender, Politics and Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Spector, Stephen, ed., 1991. “Joseph’s Doubt.” In The N-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D8. EETS, s.s. 11–12. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stubbes, Philip, 1583. The Anatomie of Abuses. Early English Books Online. http:// quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=eebo;idno=A13086.0001.001 Walker, Greg, and John McGavin, 2016. Imagining Spectatorship: From the Mysteries to the Shakespearean Stage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whitfield-White, Paul, 2008. Drama and Religion in English Provincial Society, 1485–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

8

Political Gardens in Early Modern English Drama Eoin Price

This chapter was written just as Country Life, that famous bastion of English literary history, published an astonishing argument advanced by Mark Griffiths, a botanist who, in studying an Elizabethan botany book, claimed to have revealed “the true likeness” of Shakespeare (Griffiths 2015). Channeling a mix of Dan Brown and Alan Turing, Griffiths claimed to have unlocked a complicated sequence of codes that led him to conclude that the fourth man on the book’s frontispiece is William Shakespeare. The book itself is the Herball by John Gerard, and it was printed in 1597, when Shakespeare was 33 (Gerard 1597). The picture depicts a young, handsome man, bedecked in the laurel wreaths so often associated with poets. As such, it might provide an attractive and plausible image of the supposedly sexy, exciting young writer, whose plays and poems were beginning to take the London literary scene by storm. Shakespeare’s roots in the green world of Warwickshire and the interest his plays show in flowers and gardens, long appreciated by critics, mean that the image may be appropriate (Ellacombe 1896; Montrose 1977; Wilders 1978; and more recently Frances 2012). However, Shakespeare scholars and book historians are skeptical of these claims: Michael Dobson has well described the image, as of “a man in a toga, holding a little bit of a corn on the cob in one hand and a fritillary in the other” (quoted in Cartledge 2015). Even so, while the claims themselves seem spurious (Griffiths mistakes a printer’s device for a piece of code, for example) they do draw attention to interesting links (real as well as imagined) between Shakespeare, gardens, and politics. In this chapter, I shall consider some of these connections in greater detail. The seventeenth-century poet and philosopher Andrew Marvell captured one of the prevalent cultural attributes of gardens when he wrote of them as places of solitude and political withdrawal: . . . Fair Quiet, have I found thee here, And Innocence, thy sister dear! Mistaken long, I sought you then In busy companies of men; Your sacred plants, if here below,

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His characterization has many parallels in Renaissance drama. We might think, for example, of how in Twelfth Night, Malvolio asks to be allowed to “enjoy his private,” (3.4.86) before he is observed from a box tree. In this scene, Malvolio is not afforded his longed-for privacy, but it is telling that he thinks he can achieve it by being outside. As Mary Thomas Crane has argued, privacy was more easily attainable outside of the Renaissance household (Crane 2009); Malvolio would probably be less likely to “enjoy his private” indoors, given the architectural design of the period’s buildings (see Orlin 2007). Malvolio hopes to leave the politics of his day job behind so he can enjoy himself in a garden space. In a different generic vein, Renaissance dramatists often depicted stoics as withdrawing to the safe retreat of a green space. Characters like George Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois express a desire for such withdrawal when faced with the suffocating corruption of the court (Chapman 1607). Bussy does not get his wish and is instead consumed by the inescapable vices of court politics but perhaps a withdrawal to his desired, apolitical green retreat may have saved him. Green retreats, then, were frequently figured as places of solitude. They were imagined as spaces in which politics might be avoided. Nonetheless, gardens had a political dimension too, the pastoral worlds to which characters sometimes withdraw can be thought about in political terms. In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, for example, the exiled duke sets up a woodland court that, in some crucial respects, operates like the court of a city (Curtis 2009). Politics is practiced differently in the Forest of Arden, but it is not escaped. The duke continues to rule, but his government is happier and more successful, although whether the green world can ever be replicated in the cities and courts is left uncertain. Scholars such as James Turner, Louis Montrose, and Alastair Fowler have attended to the politics of the natural world and its representation in early modern literature. Indeed, the fields of ecocriticism (Sanders 2011; Boehrer 2013) and animal studies (Fudge 2000, 2004; Boehrer 2010; Shannon 2013) have provided a rich body of work in recent years too. Such work has explored the ways in which human and natural environments are bound together. This chapter adds to this scholarship by considering the stage representation of gardens and gardeners, for while ecologically informed criticism has made significant progress in demonstrating the importance of nature in literature, the early modern stage garden has not received as much attention as the wider natural world beyond it. As I go on to discuss, gardens were often used as analogies for the politics of the commonwealth, and this is indeed the case in the plays I address. However, by focusing on gardeners, as well as gardens, I hope to add another layer to the vexed politics of the

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garden trope. Gardeners in Renaissance drama like to use their gardens to talk about politics and by doing so, I argue, they become political actors. The plays I discuss deal with the politics of gardeners in very different ways, but each broaches wider questions about political participation and social status in the period. The first section of this chapter details some of the ways in which garden metaphors circulated outside of the playhouse. This section paves the way for the next one, which analyses one of literature’s most famous garden scenes, from Shakespeare’s canonical play Richard II. The final section then addresses a much less well-known play, The Gentleman of Venice, written by James Shirley more than twenty years after Shakespeare’s death. Taken together, the two plays hint at the widely divergent ways in which the politics of gardens and gardeners might be presented. The Country Life controversy that inspired this chapter attests to Shakespeare’s weird and overpowering cultural centrality; this chapter, in turn, seeks to challenge that dominance. Indeed, it is significant Griffiths had claimed the Gerard title page image was Shakespeare; if he had claimed it was Shirley he would not have received anything like the same attention from the media. Furthermore, the Country Life front cover drew on deep-rooted ideas about Shakespeare’s genius to advertise Griffiths’ claims. The magazine’s front cover makes the comical overstatement that Griffiths has made “the greatest discovery in 400 years,” and it also promises to spin its own yarn about “[h]ow one man cracked the Tudor code.” The Country Life promoters present Griffiths as a kind of lone mastermind, situating him in relation to a long-standing popular image of Shakespeare, the singular genius (Bloom 1998). It takes the genius of one man to capture the genius of another, they seem to say. That sense of Shakespeare as disconnected from his contemporaries has been modified, but still, too often, Shakespeare is separated from the theatrical culture of which he is a part, while other, less canonical writers are left on the grass verges of the canon. To do this, it is not enough, as some literary historians have done, to take Shakespeare as representative of an entire culture. Shakespeare plays an interesting role in the dramatization of gardening, but he was not the only writer to stage horticultural politics. But before plays can be considered, it is useful to survey some of the ways in which the garden-as-political metaphor was employed in early modern culture.

Garden Politics The elaborate and beautiful image of the Herball title page can serve as a good starting point for an exploration of garden politics. Around its edges are four figures which Griffiths has claimed are images of real people. As we have seen, Griffiths has identified Shakespeare, on the right-hand side, looking off into the distance, but he has also claimed, more plausibly, to have identified the other three. One of them is the author of the book, John Gerard; one is Rembert Dedowens, the Flemish botanist whose book was a

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source for Gerard; and one is Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Lord High Treasurer at the time of publication, who was the patron of the book and Gerard’s employer. Gerard was a prolific gardener: he maintained his own garden (in which, it has been claimed, he became the first man to grow a potato in England), but he was also the curator of the Physic Garden at the College of Physicians and the superintendent of Burghley’s gardens. The title page might not reveal sensational links between Shakespeare and Burghley, as Griffiths hopes, but it does demonstrate the connections between Gerard and Burghley and between gardens and politics. Among other things, Gerard, in the book, and in his job as a gardener, was tasked with maintaining order, balance, and proportion, not unlike a state governor. In his dedicatory epistle, Gerard addresses Cecil directly and talks initially about the practicality of gardening, but it also relates to a point I shall develop more a little later: that the garden can be thought of as similar to, and linked with, the house: Furthermore, the necessary use of these fruits of the earth doth plainly appear by the great charge and care of almost all men in planting and maintaining of their gardens, not as ornaments only, but as a necessary provision also to their houses. (Gerard 1597, A2v) Gerard then continues by explaining how the study of gardens could be of benefit to princes and statesmen: And here beside the fruit, to speak again in a word of delight; gardens, especially such as you Honour hath [. . .] do singularly delight, when in them a man doth behold a flourishing shew of former beauties in the midst of winter’s force, and a goodly spring of flowers, when abroad a leaf is not to be seen. Beside these and other causes, there are many examples of those that have honoured this science: for to pass by a multitude of the Philosophers, it may please your Honour to call to remembrance that which you know of some noble Princes that have enjoyed this study with their most important matters of state. (ibid., A2v) Here, Gerard makes an explicit link between gardening and statecraft. He does treat them as separate entities, of course, although, as we will see, it was perfectly possible to talk about the garden as a kind of state. But he attests repeatedly to the value of gardening and horticultural knowledge to great princes and philosophers. After listing some examples, he concludes that the example of Solomon is before the rest and greater, whose wisdom and knowledge [were] such that he was able to set out the nature of all

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plants, from the highest cedar to the lowest moss. But my very good Lord, that which sometime was the study of great philosophers and mighty princes, is now neglected, except it be of some few, whose spirit and wisdom hath carried them among other parts of wisdom and counsel, to a care and study of special herbs, both for the furnishing of their gardens and the furtherance of their knowledge. (ibid., A2v) Gerard is being playful here. In a rhetorical maneuver he positions himself alongside the great philosophers and princes and laments the decline in gardening knowledge that he now seeks to restore through his extensive, and expensive book, dedicated to his prestigious patron. Notable, too, is that he talks about his skill in gardening in terms of “counsel” while he addresses one of the queen’s counselors. Furthermore, in this passage Gerard suggests that gardening serves not only an immediate, material, practical purpose but also a wider, intellectual one: “the furtherance” of knowledge. Finally, this passage demonstrates that the language of botany can easily apply to political situations: the tall cedars are analogous to the elites; the lowest moss to the general populace. Gerard offers one, significant, example of how the garden is ripe for politicization, but he was far from alone in outlining the links between the garden and the state. For example, in The English Husbandman, Gervase Markham made a series of connections among the household and the state, the garden and the state, and the garden and the household (Markham 1635). The management of the latter, of course, had long featured in conduct books stretching back to the medieval period. One common tactic, employed by the writers of conduct books later, was to talk about the duties of a husband, or a wife, in terms of an “office,” as one might talk about the office of a statesman. So Markham writes, To speak then first of the tilling of grounds. You shall well understand, that it is the office of every good husbandman before he put his plough into the earth, truly to consider the nature of his grounds, and which is of which quality and temper. (Markham 1635, F3r) He also writes of “[t]he office of the Fruiterer, or the Gatherer, and keeper, of Fruit” (ibid., X3v). Other analogies deriving from gardening and husbandry were also commonly used. Bees were often used to analogize government, as Jonathan Woolfson demonstrates (Woolfson 2010), and other insects, like caterpillars, have served a similar function, as I will discuss (and see Emily Cock’s chapter in this volume). The household was often also spoken about as a commonwealth. For example, William Vaughan wrote that “every man is a king in his own house” (Vaughan 1600), William Gouge described the family as “a little commonwealth” (Gouge 1622), and Richard

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Brathwait referred to the family as “a private commonwealth” (Brathwait 1630). Before he would go on to become the Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney wrote a conduct book titled The Flower of Friendship in which he drew together the botanical and the domestic. According to Tilney, marriage was like a flower, but it was also like an office; husbands and wives had particular duties that they were expected to perform (Wayne 1992). As we shall see, the metaphorical resonances of the garden and the household offered rich opportunities to dramatic writers too.

The Politics of Gardening in Richard II Perhaps the most famous example of a politicized stage garden is found in Shakespeare’s Richard II (2011), produced in 1595. The scene begins with Queen Isabella and her ladies, standing anxiously in a royal garden, waiting for news of her troubled husband: Queen: Lady: Queen:

What sport shall we devise here in this garden To drive away the heavy thought of care? Madam, we’ll play at bowls. ’Twill make me think the world is full of rubs And that my fortune rubs against the bias. (3.4.1–5)

The queen hopes that the garden might be a place of freedom and pleasure, but she knows that it will not be, and her attempts to imagine such a place give way to political analogizing: the bowls remind her of the bias of fortune. The queen then eavesdrops on the conversation of some gardeners. This represents an inversion of a common trope of observation, in which it is normally the lady in the garden who is observed and scrutinized (see chapters by Smith and Morgan in this volume). Here, it is the queen who watches, and listens to, the gardener and his servants. Shakespeare creates a visual mirroring effect on stage: the queen and her two ladies listen; the gardener and his two men talk. The gardener is employed by the crown but is not a member of the nobility. His position gives him privileged access to matters of state through his proximity to his employers, and here he holds center stage in the royal garden and talks perceptively about the kingdom, in terms of both the garden and the household. He compares the “dangling apricots” not only to “unruly children” (3.4.29–30) but also, implicitly, to dangerous rebels. He calls the garden a “commonwealth” (3.4.35) and refers to his role as one of “government” (3.4.36). This is an extraordinary thing for him to do, at this moment, in this place, but it is not an act of treason but, rather, an astute piece of political commentary: the kind of commentary the king would have been well advised to consider. Bolingbroke, the play’s ostensibly successful king, does what Richard will not, pruning the dangling apricots by beheading the king’s favorites.

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In the scene, the servant continues his master’s political metaphor by referring to the “caterpillars” (3.4.47) that corrupt the plant of the commonwealth and the “weeds” (3.4.44) that overrun “our sea-wallèd garden” (3.4.43; and see Staley 2012). The garden is not a place in which politics can be escaped but, rather, is one in which politics might be learned. The gardener and his servants have furthered their political knowledge, playfully using the kind of language later employed by Gerard in his dedicatory epistle. Jeffrey Doty has argued that, in this scene, and in the play more broadly, the theatergoers, who, evidence invites us to assume, were a heterogeneous group, also learn something about politics (Doty 2010). The play asks them to come to their own political judgments, and no matter how basic their analysis may be, an audience member is likely to have left the theatre having contemplated one of the more incendiary of political questions: whether it is justifiable to depose an anointed ruler. This question is on the border of the garden scene, but the garden is central to what is one of Shakespeare’s most political plays. The gardener is, of course, speaking poetry; Shakespeare was not striving for verisimilitude here. Gardeners (particularly head gardeners, whose role was, effectively, to manage the land rather than to engage in manual labor themselves) may have analogized the gardens and offered perceptive political opinion, but they did not, surely, speak in perfect blank verse. Nonetheless, this is poetry that is built out of a preexistent cultural language. Shakespeare harnesses this language, encouraging his audience to put it to their own use. The garden metaphor has the potential to be trite, and its frequent usage could easily make it a cliché. However, it is certainly not a cliché here. In the mouths of the gardeners, it becomes a potent political message that enables them to be participants, rather than simply subjects, in the political landscape.

The Politics of Gardening in The Gentleman of Venice James Shirley’s The Gentleman of Venice, written twenty-two years after Richard II but printed only in 1655 (Shirley 1655), also makes garden politics central to its action. Plays written during the reign of Charles I have, on the whole, a bad reputation. Despite some noble attempts to rehabilitate the drama of the period they have been seen as backward-looking and derivative, even though we might also see a kind of profitable creativity in their allusiveness (see, e.g., Butler 1984; Dyson 2013; Bailey 2009; and on Shirley specifically, Burner 1989). So it is, I argue, with The Gentleman of Venice, a kind of mash-up of several Shakespeare plays, including Richard II, that nonetheless provides its own compelling twist. In this play, the twist is that the tyrannous duke, Thomazo, is not really the duke at all but, in fact, the son of a gardener. Thomazo had been swapped at birth with Giovanni, the real prince, who had lived out his life thus far working as a gardener. In the end this is, perhaps, a displeasingly conservative outcome: the ignoble

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Thomazo is replaced by the regal Giovanni. Thomazo’s utter inability to rule is directly related to his low birth: had he spent his life as a gardener, he might have been fine, but the temptations of power are too much for his base flesh. Giovanni, on the other hand, proves to be a good ruler once restored to his proper station, but his nobility can be glimpsed even when he is a gardener. In The Gentleman of Venice, therefore, the garden is a place in which Giovanni can prove his mastery, and his qualities are appreciated early on. One of the characters, Marcello, remarks that “nobleness lived there / In Giovanni, not suppressed in poverty” and, in one of the play’s funnier scenes, another character, Georgio, the gardener’s servant, notes Giovanni’s extraordinary skill in topiary: Would you would speak to him though, to take a little More pains, ’tis I do all the droile, the durtwork: When I am digging; he is cutting Unicornes, And Lyons in some hedge, or else devising New knots upon the ground, drawing out Crowns And the Dukes armes, Castles and Cannons in ’em, Here Gallies, there a Ship giving a broad side, Here out of turfe he carves a Senatour With all his robes, making a speech to Time That grows hard by, and twenty curiosities, I think he meanes to embroider all the Garden Shortly, but I do all the course-work. Giovanni’s topiary reflects his noble identity; the forms of the topiary he produces are distinctly—although, in the context, comically—noble. This scene serves to point up the discrepancy between the innately royal Giovanni and the lowly gardeners. Ultimately, then, Shirley’s play is not especially kind to gardeners: the reason Giovanni is so skilled is that he is actually destined for greater things. Georgio complains about doing all the hard labor, but the play seems to say: that is how it should be. It thus posits an inviolable distinction between the noble and the nonnoble: Thomazo cannot be made truly noble; Giovanni, despite his occupation as a gardener, constantly reveals his innate nobility. Shirley optimistically explains corruption at the court of Venice as the result of an unusual but easily rectifiable quirk: the noble and the nonnoble are reassigned to their respective positions. The garden is, in fact, an ambiguous political space. On one hand, that the real gardener’s son cannot handle official power and must, therefore, return to the obscurity of his birthplace, suggests that gardens are not political. Later in the play, the duke exclaims that Giovanni’s words “taste more of courtier than the Garden.” On the other hand, though, the garden is a place where Giovanni demonstrates his innate nobility. It is also clear that the garden is part of a wider political structure:

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the dukedom needs gardeners, because it needs subjects. Giovanni’s amazing topiary is frivolous without Georgio’s hard garden labor.

Conclusion The Country Life controversy with which I began this chapter is now largely forgotten, but it ought to be remembered for bringing Gerard’s important botanical work to a wider audience. Gerard’s Herball does have Shakespearean connections, just not in the way that Griffiths might like to admit. This chapter has suggested that botanical books like Herball can provide an illuminating context for early modern politics and that the kinds of political connections it advances could be harnessed by dramatists to create nuanced political scenes. Emily Cock’s chapter in this volume has discussed a range of significant horticultural texts, which provide evidence of early modern gardening practices. In contrast, this chapter has focused on the political and artistic possibilities of gardening. Early modern people used gardens to imagine political worlds; it should not be surprising, then, that they were attractive to dramatists like Shakespeare and Shirley. The gardeners in their plays are situated in complex political landscape. Shakespeare’s gardeners remain at once cut off from the bloodshed spilt in the name of politics and yet also right at the center, dramaturgically, of the political play world. Shirley’s gardeners are also complicated; on one hand, they are clearly presented as inferior to the ruling class; on the other, their labor is valuable politically, as well as aesthetically. The gardeners discussed in this chapter are implicated in the politics of their plays, and the gardens in which they work are never neutral places of solitude but the loci of political activity.

Bibliography Bailey, Rebecca A., 2009. Staging the Old Faith: Queen Henrietta Maria and the Theatre of Caroline England, 1625–1642. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bloom, Harold, 1998. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books. Boehrer, Bruce, 2010. Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Boehrer, Bruce, 2013. Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brathwait, Richard, 1630. The English Gentleman. London. Burner, Sandra A., 1989. James Shirley: A Study of Literary Coteries and Patronage in Seventeenth-Century England. Lanham, MD and London: University Press of America. Butler, Martin, 1984. Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cartledge, James, 2015. “Row over Claims of New Shakespeare Image showing Bard with ‘Film Star Good Looks’.” Birmingham Mail, 19 May. http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/row-over-claims-new-shakespeare-9289286

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Chapman, George, 1607. The Tragedy of Bussy d’Ambois. London: William Aspley. Crane, Mary T., 2009. “Illicit Privacy and Outdoor Spaces in Early Modern England.” The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9.1: 4–22. Curtis, Cathy, 2009. “The active and contemplative lives in Shakespeare’s plays.” In Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought, edited by David Armitage, Conal Condren, and Andrew Fitzmaurice, 44–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doty, Jeffrey, 2010. “Shakespeare’s ‘Richard II’, ‘Popularity’ and the Early Modern Public Sphere.” Shakespeare Quarterly 61.2: 183–205. Dyson, Jessica, 2013. Staging Authority in Caroline England: Prerogative, Law and Order in Drama, 1625–1642. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Ellacombe, Henry N., 1896. The Plant-Lore and Garden-Craft of Shakespeare. London and New York: E. Arnold. Frances, Debra, 2012. “Shakespeare’s Gardens and Nature Settings: Landscapes of the Reformation’s Spiritual Individualism.” PhD Thesis, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, PA. Fudge, Erica, 2000. Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Fudge, Erica, ed., 2004. Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans and Other Wonderful Creatures. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Gerard, John, 1597. The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes. London: John Norton. Gouge, William, 1622. Of Domestical Duties. London. Griffiths, Mark, 2015. “Face to Face with Shakespeare.” Country Life, 20 May, 120–138. Markham, Gervase, 1635. The English Husbandman. Marvell, Andrew, 1681. “The Garden.” In Miscellaneous Poems. London. Printed for Robert Boulter. Montrose, Louis A., 1977. “Curious-Knotted Garden”: The Form, Themes and Contexts of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. Salzburg: Institut für englische Sprache und Literatur. Orlin, Lena C., 2007. Locating Privacy in Tudor London. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sanders, Julie, 2011. The Cultural Geography of Early Modern London, 1620– 1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shakespeare, William, 2008. Twelfth Night, ed. Keir Elam. London: Arden Shakespeare. Shakespeare, William, 2011. Richard II, eds. Antony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shannon, Laurie, 2013. The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shirley, James, 1655. The Gentleman of Venice. London: Humphrey Moseley. Staley, Lynn, 2012. The Island Garden: England’s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Taylor, Gary, and John Lavagnino, eds., 2007. Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vaughan, William, 1600. The Golden Grove. London. Wayne, Valerie, ed., 1992. Edmund Tilney, The Flower of Friendship: A Renaissance Dialogue Contesting Marriage. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wilders, John, 1978. The Lost Garden: A View of Shakespeare’s English and Roman History Plays. London: Macmillan. Woolfson, Jonathan, 2010. “The Renaissance of Bees.” Renaissance Studies 24.2: 281–300.

Part IV

Gardens and Transformation

9

Horti Recidivi The Restoration and Re-Creation of Medieval Gardens in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Manuel Schwembacher

This chapter examines concepts in the restoration and re-creation of medieval gardens based on ten case studies. These may be categorized as • •



restored gardens (Haverfordwest Priory, Mount Grace Priory, and the Tudor garden of Kenilworth Castle), re-created gardens (that of Queen Eleanor in Winchester, the Bayleaf Farmhouse in West Sussex, Tretower Court in Powys, and Prebendal Manor, Northants.), and the “modern-medieval” gardens (the English Heritage Contemporary Heritage Garden Scheme, the gardens of the Musée du Moyen Age in Paris and the Naumburg Cathedral).

It first traces changing approaches towards historic gardens, before discussing aspects that influence the perception of these gardens.

Changing Approaches Towards Historic Gardens Restoring historic gardens, defined by the Joint Committee of ICOMOS (the International Council on Monuments and Sites) as “an architectural and floral composition which is of interest to the public from both an historical and an artistic point of view” (Bourke 1983, 50) and re-creating gardens in a historic style, whether medieval or later, has become increasingly popular since the second half of the twentieth century and particularly in the last decades. During this time, knowledge, fashions, and philosophy have changed especially within the heritage gardens industry, creating a dynamic array of approaches and positions regarding historic gardens in general. For instance, from the 1950s until the 1970s, modernists like Frank Clark tried to lay great stress on the “[Z]eitgeist” in the sense that the “psyche of each period was thought to reveal itself through the work of that period” through geniuses who were able to produce seminal statements as, for instance, William Kent and the 3rd Lord Burlington in their creation of the gardens at Chiswick House. The goal of restoration was to reflect the

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period of greatest significance and the creativity of such geniuses (Jacques 2005, 409). In this context, the theory of “significant form” was important, in the sense that the “ideas behind designs [. . .] were important, not the designs per se.” Therefore, restorations could be “‘in the spirit’ of the place” without being pedantic, a conviction that often eventuated in highly inauthentic results (ibid., 410). The second approach, also emerging in the 1950s, was developed by the National Trust Garden advisor Graham Stuart Thomas, who promoted a “programme of eclectic revivalism” (Elliott 2010, 5), which meant that “each house was to have a garden that reflected the most important period in the house’s history” based on research (ibid., 1). This policy is nowadays still relevant and followed by other organizations like English Heritage and the National Trust for Scotland. The aim to reconstruct historic gardens in their heyday in as accurate a manner as possible can be achieved with the help of surviving documents, plans, illustrations, and historic photographs, as well as garden archaeology. An early example of this approach was the restoration of the garden of Ham House in Surrey in 1974. Yet later it was found that the surviving plans and “views” were actually designs, which were unreliable guides to how the gardens had actually looked (Jacques 2005, 413). The most acclaimed cases are the restoration of the Privy Garden at Hampton Court in 1994–1995 and the Elizabethan Garden at Kenilworth Castle, which opened in 2009. Emerging in the 1980s and contrasting to Thomas’s philosophy, was the approach of “exploring the course of a garden’s history,” based on the position that a garden is the sum of its entire history and that every period in that history should be respected, a school of thought that was originally focused on buildings and largely shaped by William Morris in the 1870s (Elliott 2010, 14–15). In this approach, the overlays of a garden are understood as an essential dimension of their history and the “default position became to repair as found, rather then to restore than to re-make” (Jacques 2005, 414). This trend for “conservation as found” (Elliott 2010, 17) has increasingly become more and more important. These different approaches obviously also had their impact on medieval gardens. The special situation of the latter is, however, that basically no medieval garden has survived completely unchanged since its creation. This is due to the fact that favored styles changed, meaning the replacement of out-of-fashion features, and that many elements in gardens are themselves ephemeral. However, a variety of different sources provide information about medieval gardens for the researcher: besides literary descriptions, treatises, and late medieval images, analytical field surveys and garden archaeology have risen in importance. All the more so as abandoned gardens rank among the commonest type of archaeological sites in Britain (Taylor 2000, 38, with a range of sites 39–50). Usually, “the most tangible traces are those defining the perimeter of the garden space,” including walls, ditches, banks, ponds, fountains, arrangements of beds, and stone-lined

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paths (Creighton 2009, 27). Several of these features were, for instance, discovered during the excavations of Haverfordwest Priory in the 1990s and during the field survey at Ravensworth Castle in 2007, both of which are discussed later. Harvey’s statement that “all restoration of medieval gardens can only be re-creation to an imagined prototype, reconstructed on paper from many different sources” (Harvey 1988, 20) can now be contested in the light of such emerging evidence. While some medieval or early modern gardens, like those at Mount Grace Priory or Kenilworth Castle, were renewed in situ, for example, where centuries before gardens had been laid out, others were re-created within a historic site but without a basis of direct evidence for the existence of a specific earlier garden in that location (Harvey 1988, 6). In contrast to a restoration that, in the strict sense, is the process of “returning the existing fabric of a place to a known earlier state” (Bourke 1983, 50), which implies replacements in the case of ephemeral fabrics like plants (Lambert and Lovie 2006, 94), re-creation is “an art of pastiche, attempting to provide an impression as accurate as possible of the type of work which would have been likely at that place in a certain historical period [. . .] [associated with] a particular generation” (Harvey 1988, 6). It can also be seen as a “jigsaw of the most common features” (Landsberg 1998, 8). Re-creations based on “the three principles of authenticity, practicality and aesthetics [. . .] provide a vivid opportunity for the appreciation of medieval gardens through all our senses” (ibid., 10). When re-creating gardens in a historic style, for reasons of authenticity it is essential to avoid anachronism in planting schemes, which can be difficult, especially with roses, fruits, and vegetables, since often a huge number of varieties have been introduced over time while others have vanished, and historic plant lists, if available, are frequently ambiguous. For Harvey, authenticity derives from knowledge of the original work and its style. Besides checking the date of introduction of plants, if known, two other factors are essential for “[h]istorical accuracy or at least reasonable probability”: the level of wealth of the historic owners, as well as the garden’s aspect and soil (Harvey 1988, 15). A pioneering example of a re-creation of a garden of period character is Queen Eleanor’s Garden at Winchester Castle, which was opened in 1986. When aiming to re-create a medieval garden, Landsberg argues that it is crucial to guard against falling into the trap of merging quite distinct types in order to remain convincing (1998, 8). Therefore, she designs her re-creations starting from the assumed owner of the garden at a specific time—for instance, a courtier, monk, peasant, queen, or a specific historic figure—an approach that has also been used by other garden planners. The original owners, whether they are a historic figure or a group of individuals with a connection to restored sites or whether an imagined person in a re-created garden, are as much a part of the garden as the modern designer, since their ideas shape and outline its character. Thus, the Shrewsbury Abbey

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Garden was inspired by and named after Brother Cadfael, the literary medieval monk detective starring in novels by Ellis Peters, and the garden of the historic fifteenth-century physician Nicholas Colnet was re-created at his residence at Prebendal Manor. As a result, no restoration, reconstruction, or re-creation can be neutral. The following examples give a selected overview of important restored and re-created medieval gardens.

Restored and Re-Created Medieval Gardens It is important to emphasize that the expression “medieval garden” implies much more than the well-known hortus conclusus, as it encompasses a variety of different gardens, which were used by many and for multiple purposes being, as Creighton has concluded, “bubbles of social exclusivity and microclimates for horticulture” (2009, 13). My first two examples belong to the group of monastic gardens; both of them were renewed on-site after archaeological excavations that revealed a considerable amount of information about the original gardens. Although both of them are like monastic gardens in general, “primarily inward-looking designed spaces, [. . .] accessed and experienced almost exclusively by monastic communities” (Creighton 2009, 49), gardens such as these fulfilled distinct functions and were addressed to diverse audiences. Indeed, very lavish medieval monastic gardens with an evident character as an object of display are also known like the gardens of Peterborough Abbey (ibid., 50). While the excavated gardens at Haverfordwest Priory were used by the community collectively, the one at Mount Grace Priory is a garden essentially made for and used by a single person. Haverfordwest Priory and Mount Grace Priory During archaeological excavation campaigns carried out in the 1980s and 1990s on the site of the Augustinian priory of Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire, Wales, the remains of a well-preserved garden were unearthed. While the origins of the priory date to around 1200, when Robert Fitz Richard, Lord of Haverford, gave the site to the Augustinians, the remains of the garden date probably to the fourteenth or fifteenth century (for a detailed history see Rees 2010, 68–71). Since the Priory was built on the banks of the river Cleddau, it had to be protected with a substantial precinct wall along the riverside. There, within the southeast corner of the monastic complex between the precinct wall, the church, and the east range of buildings a sunny, sheltered area was created that was ideal for the installation of gardens. A group of eight square and rectangular raised garden beds was laid out in a grid arrangement and are preserved on a stretch of land covering approximately 50 meters north/south by 20 meters east/west, with a ninth one situated next to the south range and probably a tenth one east of the church. Each of the raised beds is retained by small stonewalls

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and paths. One central bed, directly accessible through a door from the dormitory block adjacent to the Chapter House, is particularly ornate. This one shows evidence of an internal path around a centrally positioned raised bed, turf benches, and most probably originally an arbor (Rees 2010, 71; Creighton 2009, 29–30). During the restoration work, the remains of the paths and the raised beds were secured, the latter being nowadays planted with appropriate vegetables and flowers, whereas other transient structures like the assumed wooden arbor were not reconstructed. In contrast to Haverfordwest, it was the aim at Mount Grace Priory to reconstruct the medieval garden based on excavations. Mount Grace is a Carthusian monastery in the North Riding of Yorkshire situated on the medieval road from York to Durham. Despite the inevitable structural losses that took place in the centuries after the Dissolution, the Priory, which was founded in 1398 and dissolved in 1539, remains the best preserved of the ten Carthusian houses in England (for a detailed account of Mount Grace’s history see Coppack and Douglas 2014, 25–40). This is largely due to the fact that in 1898 Sir Isaac Lothian Bell, a successful industrialist, bought the Priory and extended not merely the residence within the medieval north guest house in the Arts and Crafts style but, rather, began substantial repair and restoration of some of the monastic structures (ibid., 40; it remained in the Bell family until 1944 and is now managed by English Heritage). One of Bell’s most noticeable interventions was the complete rebuilding of a monk’s cell together with the surrounding enclosure and the garden within. Carthusian monasteries have a very specific architectural layout, which echoes the order’s emphasis on contemplation, silence, and solitude, and Mount Grace is no exception. The design provided individual cells for each monk of the community, where the men lived like hermits for most of the time in isolation. The individual cells with their private gardens occupy three sides of the Great Cloister north of the church; there were fifteen altogether at the latest building stage dated to around 1480. Between 1901 and 1905 Sir Isaac Lothian Bell rebuilt cell number 8 in the middle of the covered north alley, a solid two-story stone building, originally erected in around 1480. English Heritage substantially refitted this cell in the 1980s using the evidence of other cells, contemporary illustrations, and excavation (www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/mount-grace-priory/history/ description/, accessed July 9, 2015). Cell number 8 occupies approximately one-quarter of the rectangular plot, which is, on all four sides, surrounded by walls of over 4 meters in height without windows, thus creating a veritable C-shaped walled garden around the monk’s lodging (Figure 9.1). The garden was re-created on the basis of excavations on the site. The archaeological evidence for the galleries was also taken into account, and reference was made to the range of plants available in the late middle ages. As a result, the reconstruction currently showcases a garden with several structural elements: a roofed gallery on one side of the wall, linking the lodging with the latrine in the opposite corner and providing a sheltered

Figure 9.1 Mount Grace Priory Garden Photo © Manuel Schwembacher.

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sitting place; an additional small glazed private cloister with a wooden floor; and stone pavements, which encircle the soil patches and ensure a clean and comfortable access to the planted areas. Asymmetrically arranged patches are confined and defined by hedges of boxwood. In some ways the layout of this small walled garden echoes the Great Cloister just outside the cell with its plantations and pavements. There was no shortage of water in the gardens of Mount Grace since several springs on-site provided enough supply, and drinking and irrigation water was carried to each cell through lead pipes from the water tower positioned in the middle of the cloister garden (Coppack and Douglas 2014, 31). Excavations in Mount Grace have shown that although most of the gardens of the monks are basically standardized in their size—with the exception of the cells number 10 and 5 because of their positioning on the corners of the great cloister—their designs and layouts in their fifteenth- and sixteenth-century phases “were executed rather individualistically, largely as pleasure grounds rather than for growing vegetables” (Creighton 2009, 30; see also Gilchrist 1995, 199– 201). Cell number 9, for example, featured in the fifteenth century—appropriate to the layout of the garden—an arrangement of three planting beds, which were divided by grass paths; the garden of cell number 10 was mainly grassed with some decorative elements. While nowadays English Heritage maintains all the cells’ gardens as grass areas, the current planting scheme of the beds in the restored garden of cell number 8 is strictly based on species that were available in England in the late Middle Ages, comprising, for example, iris and artemisia. The reconstruction of the garden was also consistent with that of the site of the priory, for the cell, and its surrounding walls, had also been reconstructed. This forms a quasi-autonomous reconstituted structure within the ruinous setting, a structure that is perfectly consistent with the site and its history. A large number of other monastic gardens have been excavated although not restored. Among these are Denny Abbey in Cambridgeshire, the Augustinian Priory in Hull and the Gilbertine Priory in York (Creighton 2009, 30, and for Hull Richardson and Dennison 2014, 30). Ravensworth Castle and Kenilworth Castle Alongside monastic gardens, those associated with castles and manors constitute a prominent group, which comprise different features (see also the chapter by Smith in this volume). Although in the strictest sense no medieval castle garden has been restored on site after an excavation—gardens such as those at Tretower Court and Prebendal Manor are still re-creations—it is illuminating to discuss the remnants of the unexcavated and unrestored medieval garden at Ravensworth Castle, since sites such as these provide a considerable insight into structures that have not been built over in postmedieval times. In contrast to this relatively unknown medieval castle is the illustrious Kenilworth Castle, which also features a famous restoration and

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reconstruction of an early modern Tudor garden. Reconstructions of Tudor period gardens may be found in turn at the Knot Garden in front of the Old Palace at Hatfield House, designed by the 6th Marchioness of Salisbury in 1981 on a site where gardens were always present, and the garden at the Tudor House Museum and Garden in Southampton by Sylvia Landsberg (Snell and Marchioness of Salisbury 2005, 42–46; Harvey 1988, 29 and 33–34; https://tudorhouseandgarden.com/, accessed December 5, 2016). The ruins of Ravensworth Castle, once the residence of the Fitzhugh family, are situated in the village of the same name about 7 kilometers north of Richmond in North Yorkshire. Nowadays the site preserves few remaining standing structures, which are mainly the result of a late fourteenth-century remodeling of an earlier complex, as well as well-preserved earthworks featuring gardens, a mere, moats, and terraces. After a first measured earthwork survey in 1997, a second one was undertaken in 2007, which led to the identification of at least two separate phases of medieval garden development (Richardson and Dennison 2014, 21). The gardens lay outside the walled areas of the castle and beyond the “watery landscape” of the inner moat (Liddiard and Williamson 2008, 526). They “comprise six shallow sub-square conjoined enclosures (A to F)” of unequal size, extending on an area 65 meters north/south by 50 meters east/west, forming a slightly irregular grid pattern. Two of the enclosures, A and B, which are the ones most distant from the castle, are preserved and date from the first stage of garden development at Ravensworth. Enclosure A contained, for instance, a quadrangular arrangement of square, slightly raised beds, divided by paths. The four southern enclosures, C through F, were of a different plan: their pathways are better defined, positioned on a slightly divergent alignment, and, above all, terraced. These terraces, with their raised beds, partially overlay the earlier gardens, and the beds are similar in size to those excavated at Haverfordwest Priory (Richardson and Dennison 2014, 28–29). Richardson and Dennison emphasize that the gardens were deliberately positioned to be seen or overlooked from a raised viewpoint from the castle complex (ibid., 33). Such a viewpoint is also essential for the appreciation and reception of the sixteenth-century Tudor garden at Kenilworth, a castle that is, nowadays, predominantly associated with its Elizabethan period but was also an outstanding aristocratic and royal residence for centuries before. The history of Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire, with its origins in the 1120s, is relatively well documented after 1174, for it was taken into royal ownership for strategic reasons (for a detailed account see Morris 2010, 36–52). In the second half of the fourteenth century John of Gaunt enlarged Kenilworth on a grand scale; the existence of pleasure gardens at that time is more than likely, but no traces have survived (ibid., 34). We know, however, that from 1414 to 1417 Henry V created a vast recreational facility on the far side of the artificial lake known as the Great Mere, which was called the “Pleasance in the Marsh” (Mawrey and Groves 2010, 12; Morris 2010, 44). There, a garden of about one hectare surrounded a wooden manor retreat for the king and his guests, of which only a few earthworks are visible

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Figure 9.2 Kenilworth Castle Garden Photo © Manuel Schwembacher.

today. In contrast to that, modern visitors to the castle can enjoy the famous Elizabethan garden, which Robert Dudley originally created in 1575 and which English Heritage reinstated in 2009 (Figure 9.2). Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (1533–1588), to whom Elizabeth I granted Kenilworth in 1563, realized a number of ambitious projects on the site, including a new façade on the east range and the massive “Leicester’s Building” (Morris 2010, 46). Adjacent to the north side of the keep Dudley financed an elegant privy garden on the occasion of Queen Elizabeth I’s visit in 1575. This was the fourth visit of the ruler to Kenilworth and was celebrated with lavish feasts lasting for days and featured the new garden as one of the highlights. Although Elizabeth’s garden was mainly lost during the Civil War, a relatively clear depiction of it survived through the centuries in the form of a detailed account of an eyewitness, who described the garden in a letter in the year of its creation. Although the writer, Robert Langham, an usher to Leicester, allegedly addressed the letter to his friend Humfrey Martyn, it was certainly “a brilliant piece of propaganda” intended for a wider audience (Woodhouse 2008, 98). This letter describing “The Magnificent Pageants presented before Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth Castle in 1575” became a crucial document for the team aiming at the re-creation of the garden (Kuin 1983; Goldring 2013, 59–64; extracts from the letter at www.english-heritage.org.uk/content/visit/places-to-visit/ history-research-plans/extracts-from-robert-langhams-letters, accessed July 11, 2015; and see Keay, Adams and Goldring 2013, 171–173). In 1975 the ministry’s inspector Harry Gordon Slade completed a first reconstruction

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of the Elizabethan garden, featuring yew trees and lavender-filled beds surrounded by box hedges (Mawrey and Groves 2010, 16). The layout was partly inspired by Sir William Dugdale’s plan of 1656, which turned out to be inaccurate (Morris 2010, 24). Aware of this, and knowing that the roots of the maturing yews were threatening any possible traces of original features left in the ground, in 2004 English Heritage commissioned a research program for “a more authentic recreation” of the garden (ibid., 34). This led to analytical field surveys and excavations on the site in 2005 and 2006, which also proved the accuracy of Langham’s account (Dix, Kerr and Prentice 2013, 65–74). Originally, the rectangular garden could first be seen from a small Italianate courtyard alongside the keep, from which steps led to a high terrace, whose balustrade was decorated with obelisks, statues, and spheres made of painted wood. Langham reports, Whearin hard all along the Castl wall iz reared a pleazaunt Terres of a ten foot hy and a twelve brode: eeven under food and fresh of fyne grass: az iz allso the syde thearof toward the gardein, in which by sundry equall distauncez: with obelisks, sphearz, and white bearz all of stone upon theyr curioouz basez, by goodly sheaw wear set [. . .] (Kuin 1983, 69) The obelisks, bears, and spheres were most probably not made of porphyry, but from timber painted to look like porphyry and were therefore reconstructed from wood (Morris 2010, 35). The garden itself below had a strict geometrical layout with four rectangular beds, divided by two wide paths and, in the center, rose a massive fountain made of Carrara marble. Langham reports, In the center (as it wear) of this goodly Gardein, was theer placed, a very fayr Foountain, cast intoo an eight square, reared a four foot hy: from the midst wearof a Colum up set in shape of too Athlants joyned togeather a backhallf, the toon looking East, toother west: with theyr hands, upphollding a fayr foormed boll of a three foot over: from wheans sundry fine pipez, did lively distill continuall streamz into the receyt of the Foountayn [. . .]. In the top, the ragged Staff, which, with the boll, the piller, and eight sydez beneath, wear all heawen oout of rich and hard white Marbl. A one syde, Neptune with hiz Tridental Fuskin triumphing in hiz Throne, trayled intoo the deep by his marine horsez. On an oother, Thetis in her chariot drawn by her dollphins. Then Triton by hiz fyshez. Heer Protheus hearding hiz sea bulz. (Kuin 1983, 71–72) The fountain’s octagonal base featured scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, while above two Atlantes held a sphere that sprinkled water. In the middle of each of the rectangular beds stood a wooden obelisk and an aviary in the

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classical style of 9 meters in length, which functioned as the focal point of the garden’s main axis. Dudley’s creation was a garden “drenched in allegory,” full of allusions and symbolism (Woodhouse 2008, 99). It is evident that the inspiration for this garden came partly from French and Italian Renaissance examples, but this is the earliest that such features like the aviary and obelisks, as well as the recorded water jokes, are documented in an English garden (Morris 2010, 34; for other examples in England see the chapter by Cock in this volume). Between 2007 and 2009 the layout of the garden, as well as all the previously mentioned elements were re-created on site and planted with species that would have been available in the second half of the sixteenth century. The research program at Kenilworth Castle was a significant advance, giving the opportunity to combine information that could be extracted from the excavations with that garnered from the description of Langham, resulting in an as authentic as possible retrospective restoration of the sixteenthcentury garden. While the previously mentioned examples—with the exception of Ravensworth—are gardens restored to a large extent based on archaeological evidence and sited on the place where the original gardens lay, the following ones are examples of imaginative re-creations, usually located within a historic site, albeit without direct evidence of predecessors on that specific spot. Queen Eleanor’s Garden, Bayleaf Farmhouse, Tretower Court, and Prebendal Manor Queen Eleanor’s garden in Winchester is an example of an entire recreation on a historic site. Although the existence of gardens at the Castle of Winchester is certain, since an instruction of Henry III survives to make “three herbers in this castle” in 1235, no buildings of Henry III have survived, with the exception of the Great Hall, nor is there any information of the location or the layout of those gardens (Landsberg 1998, 120). For the new garden, therefore, a triangle of ground was chosen on the south side of the Great Hall, which faces the base of the later and unfinished King’s House by Sir Christopher Wren. The project was a joint venture between Hampshire County Council and Hampshire Gardens Trust and was designed by Sylvia Landsberg with John Harvey as consulting co-designer, and opened by HM the late Queen Mother on July 8, 1986 (http://research.hgt.org.uk/ item/queen-eleanors-garden/, accessed December 3, 2016; Harvey 1988, 23; Landsberg 1998, 120–122). The aim of the project was to re-create a royal herber of the thirteenth century, as mentioned in Henry III’s instruction, within the precincts of this historic castle, imagined as a private garden for a queen living in Winchester Castle at that time. Hence, the garden was named after two eponymous queens: Eleanor of Provence, wife of Henry III, and her daughter-in-law,

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Eleanor of Castile, wife of Edward I. There was a wide range of possible approaches for the design of the garden, as Landsberg highlights: Should the garden be filled with medieval colour by incorporating patterned tiled paving and brilliant flowers, highlighted by gilding and heraldic objects—a “merrie” garden? Or was it to reflect the purity of chivalry by following Henry III’s penchant for whitewashed buildings and white-blossomed trees of cherry and pear, with even the walls behind turf seats carefully whitewashed as he had arranged at Clarendon Palace, near Salisbury? (Landsberg 1998, 121; and on Clarendon, see Richardson 2005) Some options were not realistic because of the costs, and others because of the existing surrounding medieval and modern buildings. So the herber was conceptualized around the idea that “an overall spirit of the past could be evoked with the chivalric quality of fidelity as a central theme” (ibid.). This was symbolized by the permanence of evergreen plants, which also had the advantage of being aesthetically pleasing all year round. In order to create a secluded pleasure garden, several features were included to provide joy and entertainment. In the relatively small area, a central space was filled with turf and seeded with flowers found in a meadow. An arched tunnel made of wood with vine and roses provided shade and a secluded place for walks and gatherings, and among other trees a large fig tree, a classic deciduous hedge, and ivy grown on firm trellises were included. The essential garden feature, the presence of water, was provided in the form of a channel as well as a centrally positioned ornamental fountain rising above an octagonal basin. This gothic-style column-shaped fountain with four leopard head masks and a surmounting bronze falcon is based on a description of a fountain at Charing Cross Mews in Westminster in 1275. The mason used as the basis for his work a full-size drawing of the column, and the pattern for the falcon on the top of the fountain was found in the choir stalls of Winchester Cathedral (ibid., 60, 122–123). Finally, a small herber was constructed, an exedra surrounded by wooden trellises with roses and ivy, which is entered via an archway that was personalized by using the heraldic device of Eleanor of Castile’s family (ibid., 124). The inspiration for this herber is a mid-fifteenth-century French miniature illustrating Boccaccio’s Teseida (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, Cod. 2617, fol. 53r, reproduced on the front cover of Landsberg 1998). The creators of Queen Eleanor’s Garden ensured that, on the whole, contemporary artisanal techniques like authentic masonry and joinery were used, and at the same time did justice to the genius loci of the old castle hall and the cathedral, inventing a small garden fit for a queen. Similarly in concept is the re-created garden at Tretower Court near Crickhowell in Wales, intending to show a fifteenth-century nobleman’s

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pleasure garden (Landsberg 1998, 119–120; http://cadw.gov.wales/daysout/ tretowercourtandcastle/?lang=en, accessed December 6, 2016). In 1991 Elisabeth Whittle designed the garden that is adjacent to the medieval buildings transformed in the second third of the fifteenth century by Sir Roger Vaughan, an important supporter of Edward IV. The garden includes a herber, a checkerboard layout of squares of turf together with herbaceous borders with a central fountain, a flowering meadow, and an orchard. Landsberg, together with Christopher Zeuner and Richard Harris, also re-created a rural household garden for the Bayleaf Farm at the Weald and Downland Museum near Chichester in West Sussex, which represents a yeoman’s homestead in the period from about the late fifteenth to the early sixteenth centuries (Landsberg 1998, 105–116; additional information at www.wealddown.co.uk/explore/buildings/further-reading/bayleaf-gardenorchard-shaws/?building=251, accessed December 5, 2016; the Weald and Downland Museum also features a re-created peasant couple’s garden of the thirteenth century; Harvey 1988, 23–24; Landsberg 1998, 116–118). Opened in 1990, the grounds of Bayleaf comprise, based on research, a utilitarian garden, an herber, and an orchard. The kitchen garden with its vegetables and herbs forms the largest part of the garden. It is divided into six main plots, which were subdivided by paths into several smaller beds where crops are grown in groups of three in order to accommodate the threefold rotation system. The crop rotation cycle is repeated every three years, and the plots can be of any number which is divisible by three (Landsberg 1998, 109–110). The re-created medieval gardens at Prebendal Manor in Nassington, Northamptonshire, designed by Michael Brown, cover an extensive area of ground that is mostly situated south of the manor and display an impressive arrangement of practical and decorative features, all of which are typical for a late medieval high-status garden. The central historic figure incorporated into the story of the garden is Nicholas Colnet, physician to Henry V during the Agincourt campaign, who was granted the Prebendal Manor in 1417 in return for his services (http://prebendalmanormedievalgardens.weebly. com/, accessed December 5, 2016). Brown therefore included a vast array of medicine plants, which were very likely used by Nicholas Colnet. A rose arbor, a vegetable garden, a vineyard, a trellis garden, a coppice area, fishponds, dovecotes, a pleasure garden, and meadows are all present on the grounds (for the medicinal uses of roses, see Tyers in this volume). All these examples aim to represent an authentic period garden as an accurate as possible reconstruction. In parallel, to this movement, in the last two decades, a few “modern-medieval” gardens have emerged: gardens in contemporary designs picking up on medieval features, which aim to convey “ideas” of medieval gardening and focus on symbolism. These gardens, as the following cases show, combine medieval heritage with striking new design concepts within historic sites.

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English Heritage Contemporary Heritage Garden Scheme and Two Continental Examples In 2000 English Heritage launched the “Contemporary Heritage Garden Scheme” aiming to add a new chapter to the history of a range of heritage sites of different periods (Mawrey and Groves 2010, 200–203; Watkins and Wright 2007, 29; www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/historicgardens/, accessed December 5, 2016). Within five years, ten new gardens were created, each of them selected after a competition to design them. Among the newly created gardens two are within medieval settings, one at the medieval Bishop’s Palace in Lincoln and the other at Richmond Castle in Yorkshire. The Bishop’s Palace in Lincoln, which is adjacent to the cathedral, was the residence of one of the most influential clergymen in medieval Britain. It is recorded that in 1329, Bishop Burghesh bought land alongside his residence in order to build a garden, of which no plans survive (www.englishheritage.org.uk/visit/places/lincoln-medieval-bishops-palace/garden/, accessed December 5, 2016). While the stretch of land, spanning 30 meters by 18 meters, was used as a kitchen garden in the nineteenth century, it had become derelict by the end of the millennium. Mark Anthony Walker won the English Heritage competition for creating a new garden on the piece of land. This sits well within the site and not only is framed by the Roman and medieval walls on two sides, with a vineyard on the third side, but also provides extensive vistas on the fourth side because of its elevated position above the town. Walker’s design references the cathedral nearby. Planting was kept minimalistic with a reduced group of varieties, including lavender, the dahlia “Bishop of Llandaff” and the climbing “Rosa Guinée” (www.lincolnshiregardenstrust.org.uk/EH_gardens.html, accessed December 5, 2016; Mawrey and Groves 2010, 200). Essential elements of the garden are nine clipped hornbeams, which are diagonally positioned in three rows, rising into the air “like the spires of the Cathedral.” Narrow weathered brick paths laid at precise geometric angles running between the trees echo the intricacy of the ribs supporting the cathedral’s roof. Each tree is sunk into a circlet of polished stainless steel, like the architectural bosses where the ribs intersect. Etchings on the steel circlets reference the history of Lincoln, while the garden benches are reminiscent of the stalls in the choir. With these and additional elements the garden reflects distinctive aspects of its history and setting. At Richmond Castle, the so-called Cockpit Garden, was designed in 2000 by Neil Swanson and opened in 2002. An acre in size, it is adjacent to the ruins and surrounded by a cobbled path. Swanson intended to create a garden, which invites visitors to reflect on the castle’s history (on which see Goodall 2001). On the castle website, Swanson comments, I wanted visitors to walk around the garden, seeing the topiary terrace, experiencing the gradual softening of the castle landscape, until they

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return, passing once again the same terrace, but perhaps seeing it differently, and sensing something of the unseen, human struggle which took place there. The center of the garden is a generous grass amphitheater with a circular declivity in the middle. While the architecture of the castle is reflected in the bold topiaries, there are also sixteen pieces of yew topiary, which are a reminder of the conscientious objectors held in the castle’s cell according to an information panel on-site at the castle. The decision to commemorate these sixteen enlisted men, who refused to take part in military activities and were therefore imprisoned during the First World War, was controversial, leading to a public meeting in 2002. Finally, it was decided that the trees could remain. At Richmond Castle, the new garden also aims to prompt visitors to think about the history of both specific events and human conflict on this historic site through the symbolic arrangements of plants, which have to be contextualized in order to become “readable.” With features evoking political associations, this design continues the long tradition of conveying “hidden messages” through allegorical features, as in the case of Capability Brown’s garden at Stowe in the eighteenth century (Mawrey and Groves 2010, 203). While the gardens discussed so far are in British contexts, a very prominent example of a “modern medieval” garden also exists in France, at the Musée Nationale du Moyen Âge in Paris (www.musee-moyenage.fr/, accessed June 8, 2016). Created in 2000 by the landscape gardeners Èric Ossart and Arnaud Maurières, the garden occupies the site of the historic gardens around the fifteenth-century building of the l´Hôtel des Abbés de Cluny, which nowadays houses the medieval museum collection. Nothing of the historic gardens survive and the new layout is essentially a contemporary garden, which was deeply inspired and influenced by the Middle Ages, especially by art objects in the museum itself, for example, the six famous unicorn tapestries, La Tenture de la Dame à la Licorne, created around 1500, or the La Vie Seigneuriale, both of which are millefleurs tapestries, which date from the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Extending more than 5,000 square meters, the garden consists of four different areas of which the terraces form the main part. The terraces represent central aspects of medieval gardens as well as their inherent symbolism. They are labeled as kitchen garden or potager (jardin nourricier), garden of the Virgin (jardin de la Vierge), medicinal garden (jardin des simples), celestial garden (jardin céléste), garden of love (jardin de l´amour), or meadow (préau, prairie herbassée). The garden of love, for instance, is partly fenced with a pergola that provides shelter and has benches in the form of raised turf-covered banks. Instead of having a grassy meadow the place was paved with tiles and decorated with four large pots with topiary trees. The garden of the Virgin brings together a large number of plants that were symbolically associated with Mary and Christ, and these are incorporated in

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geometrically laid out sunken beds, which re-create the magnificent visual effect of the millefleurs tapestries preserved in the museum. Beyond the terraces, which represent the domesticated aspects of nature, lies the wild wooded garden of the unicorn. Another “modern-medieval” garden lies adjacent to the German Naumburg Cathedral where, on an area of approximately 2.5 acres immediately to the southwest of the cathedral, gardens have been present since medieval times (http://naumburgermeister.eu/index.php?id=172&L=1, accessed June 8, 2016). Within this area, in close proximity to the west choir, lies the “Garden of the Naumburg Master,” which was created in 2011. Located on an ancient gardening site, this garden with its contemporary design has strong connections to the surroundings, especially to the works of the midthirteenth-century Naumburg Master, whose stonemasonry decorates the west choir and the west rood screen of the cathedral. Famous for his naturalistic style, he depicted more than 150 different plants in his stone capitals, friezes, and keystones, all of which are botanically correct and identifiable. Many of these plants are now to be found in the new garden, along with informative panels, which depict pictures of the corresponding botanical stonemasonry. The center of the garden forms a tessellated laid out square, where eight steles over 2 meters in height are positioned with corresponding stone planters. Each of these steles is dedicated to an important medieval garden plant (like the rose, ivy, fig, artemisia, and ranunculus). The steles are engraved with information about these plants. While this contemporary garden also references at its core another historical figure in the shape of the Naumburg artisan, together with traditional medieval design elements such as the checkered pattern or the elongated raised beds, also used in Paris and the Musée de Cluny, the aims and impact of the latter could not be more different to the one in Naumburg. In Paris, the design, the plantings, and the decorative elements emphasize the aim to create an atmospheric garden, intended to communicate the ideas and symbolism of the medieval imagination, and in this way to represent a kind of emotional medievalism. The conception of the garden in Naumburg, on the other hand, is contingent on the local work of the Naumburg Master; it celebrates his masterpieces and communicates at the same time an eminent didactic element where the transfer of knowledge is essential.

Contemporary Perceptions of the Hortus Recidivus Garden visiting has a long tradition with a historical continuity, which is traceable from the Middle Ages and is nowadays “deeply embedded in popular culture” (Connell 2003, 185). This popularity of gardens helps tourism to thrive, the ticket revenues support maintaining the sites, and there are signs that the importance of gardens to visitors is stable if not on the increase. For instance, in 2000 seven out of the top ten most visited properties cared for by the National Trust were gardens (ibid., 189); in 2014/2015

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the figure was eight out of the top ten (National Trust 2014/15, 77). The situation is similar for English Heritage, where many of the most popular sites feature gardens. Since English Heritage visitor surveys showed that more people visit stately homes “to see their gardens than to see the house or its contents” (Mawrey and Groves 2010, 200), the idea was born to increase the attractiveness of other sites, especially monasteries or castles, by adding gardens. For the Contemporary Heritage Garden scheme alone, English Heritage invested in total 1.5 million pounds. These new gardens are proving to be “extremely attractive,” bringing “alive [. . .] ‘dry’ attractions such as ruined abbeys” (ibid., 200, 10). This comment by Mawrey and Groves underlines the potential of gardens for improving the visitor experience through different aspects of gardens, ranging from aesthetic, botanical, and historic to recreational and social focal points. Two noteworthy aspects of garden design, those of gender and authenticity, will be referred to shortly in relation to the aforementioned restored or re-created gardens. Among the examples discussed earlier are some, which can be seen from certain points of view as predominantly female or male spaces. Two of the gardens—those at Winchester and at Kenilworth Castle—are examples of elite garden re-creations and reconstructions, which are associated with primarily female historical figures. Queen Eleanor’s Garden at Winchester was and is staged as an explicit “woman’s place” adjacent to the Great Hall of the medieval castle. Not only is the given name and character of the garden very appropriate for the place, but it is also inspiring and promising, evoking nostalgia and feelings of romanticism about a medieval royal life—a queen’s garden certainly sells well. With its retreat character, the garden refers in some ways to the hortus conclusus idea as a secluded, private space, which is charged with associations depending on the background of the visitor. The historical figure or the historical figures—the two Eleanors—are faded into the background, though. The aura of a queen and her living circumstances are essential. This situation differs significantly from the staging at Kenilworth Castle, where, with Elizabeth I, a specific, famous queen is omnipresent, together with her favorite Robert Dudley. With the restoration of the garden, which Dudley created as a token of his veneration to impress his queen, the aspects of love and reverence are still central, and the promotion of Kenilworth Castle by English Heritage both focuses on the crowd puller Elizabeth I and emphasizes her connection with Dudley by reflecting the importance of the pleasure garden for the romance between Dudley and Elizabeth. On the English Heritage website, visitors to Kenilworth are invited to “[w]alk in the footsteps of the great Tudor queen through the garden and imagine the opulence and splendour of Elizabethan Kenilworth.” Gender themes are also integrated into the concepts, layouts, or symbolism of modern medieval gardens like the garden at the Musée de Cluny in Paris, where terraces like the garden of the Virgin and the garden of love echo handed down roles and connotations of gendered spaces. Essential for all these gardens is the way in which the garden brief has fostered a

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romantic mood or harmonious space in order that it becomes a place where the visitor feels both comfortable and inspired. Two of the examples discussed are specifically male-oriented gardens: The garden at Mount Grace Priory, for instance, is a genuine male space that nevertheless reveals several associations with the hortus conclusus, a garden type, and garden topos, which is usually identified as an archetypical female space (Bauman 2013, 120; and see also Hughes-Edwards 2010, 143). Because of the hortus conclusus described in the Song of Solomon 4: 12–16, this type of enclosed garden was, from the twelfth century onward, inextricably linked with the Virgin Mary, referring to the miraculous birth of her child, and it was “portrayed as the domain of woman” (Bauman 2013, 121; and see also Liz Herbert McAvoy’s chapter in this volume). The Carthusian garden cells could be described as masculine horti conclusi, which combine both aspects of protection and safety as well as a sense of imprisonment. Once the construction of the building and the surrounding walls is completed, no one, except the monk, is allowed to enter; no one has even a possibility to glimpse into the protected garden. At the same time they are imbued with religious and iconographic traditions but change the gender of the main—and only—protagonist: the gardening monk (on the queer gender possibilities of the garden, see Amy Louise Morgan’s chapter in this volume). The re-creation of a Carthusian garden seizes on the idea of a sheltered, peaceful garden space as it was depicted and described in contemporary theological works, for instance, the miniature on folio 22v of BL Add MS 37049, a miscellany manuscript produced at Mount Grace between 1460 and 1500 (Coppack and Douglas 2014, 9). This type of monastic garden called for the creation of a place for meditation, the cultivation of plants and herbs, for work and nutrition. While the garden at Mount Grace Priory was intended as a dedicated space for a single man, the one at Haverfordwest Priory was accessible to the whole male community for gardening and recreational purposes (Skinner and Tyers, Introduction in this volume). The aspect of authenticity is important in the appreciation of restored and re-created gardens, not only for a specialist audience, who are aware of the possibilities and limits of these undertakings, but also for those without specific specialized knowledge, many of whom might perceive the garden as genuinely medieval. Therefore, on-site information and education are essential in order that these gardens succeed in promoting public understanding of medieval gardening and garden history. Restorations and re-creations have, as Keay points out for Kenilworth—and this is certainly valid for other sites as well—the potential “to change public perceptions of the past” (Keay 2013, 89), enhancing both their understanding and enjoyment. As in the case of Kenilworth, re-created gardens should be seen as long-term research projects (ibid., 91), which are bringing an important part of medieval life and culture into being to a wider public. These garden projects are for many visitors their first contact with the medieval or early modern

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periods. Such gardens, therefore, have the potential to awaken historical interest and enable a dialogue with the past to take place while being, at the same time, simply truly enjoyable and inspiring.

Bibliography Bauman, Johanna, 2013. “Verbal Representations.” In A Cultural History of Gardens in the Medieval Age, edited by Michael Leslie, 117–136. London: Bloomsbury. Bourke, Max, 1983. “How Will My Garden Grow? A Philosophy for the Restoration of Historic Gardens.” The Journal of Garden History 3.1: 49–54. Connell, Joanne, 2003. “Managing Gardens for Visitors in Great Britain: A Story of Continuity and Change.” Tourism Management 26: 185–201. Coppack, Glyn, and Mark Douglas, 2014. Mount Grace Priory: English Heritage Guidebooks. London: English Heritage. Creighton, Oliver H., 2009. Designs Upon the Land: Elite Landscapes of the Middle Ages. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer. Dix, Brian, Brian Kerr, and Joe Prentice, 2013. “The Archaeology of the Garden.” In The Elizabethan Garden at Kenilworth Castle, edited by Anna Keay and John Watkins, 65–74. Swindon: English Heritage. Elliott, Brent, 2010. “Changing Fashions in the Conservation and Restoration of Gardens in Great Britain.” Bulletin du Centre de recherche du château de Versailles. Sociétés de cour en Europe, XVIe–XIXe siècle: 1–23. doi: http://crcv. revues.org/10764 Gilchrist, Roberta, 1995. Contemplation and Action: The Other Monasticism. London: Leicester University Press. Goldring, Elizabeth, 2013. “The Langham Letter as a Source for Garden History.” In The Elizabethan Garden at Kenilworth Castle, edited by Anna Keay and John Watkins, 59–64. Swindon: English Heritage. Goodall, John, 2001. Richmond Castle and St Agatha’s Abbey, Easby: English Heritage Guidebooks. London: English Heritage. Harvey, John, 1988. Restoring Period Gardens from the Middle Ages to Georgian Times. Haverfordwest: C. I. Thomas and Sons. Hughes-Edwards, Mari, 2010. “Anchoritism, the English Tradition.” In Anchoritic Traditions of Medieval Europe, edited by Liz Herbert McAvoy, 131–152. Woodbridge: Boydell. Jacques, David, 2005. “Post-War English Attitudes in Restoration Work.” In Histories of Garden Conservation: Case-Studies and Critical Debates: Colloquio internazionale sulla storia della conservazione dei giardini, edited by Michel Conan, José Tito Rojo, and Luigi Zangheri, 409–416. Florence: Leo S. Olschki. Keay, Anna, 2013. “The Philosophy of the Reconstruction.” In The Elizabethan Garden at Kenilworth Castle, edited by Anna Keay and John Watkins, 87–92. Swindon: English Heritage. Keay, Anna, Simon Adams, and Elizabeth Goldring, 2013. “Transcripts of Select Primary Sources.” In The Elizabethan Garden at Kenilworth Castle, edited by Anna Keay and John Watkins, 171–183. Swindon: English Heritage. Kuin, Rutger J. P., ed., 1983. Robert Langham, A Letter. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Lacey, Stephen, 2005. Gardens of the National Trust. London: National Trust Books. Lambert, David, and Jonathan Lovie, 2006. “All Rosy in the Garden? The Protection of Historic Parks and Gardens.” Journal of Architectural Conservation 12.3: 83–106. Landsberg, Sylvia, 1998. The Medieval Garden. London: British Museum Press.

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Langham, Robert, 1575. The Magnificent Pageants Presented before Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth Castle in 1575. www.english-heritage.org.uk/content/visit/ places-to-visit/history-research-plans/extracts-from-robert-langhams-letters Liddiard, Robert, and Tom Williamson, 2008. “There by Design? Some Reflections on Medieval Elite Landscapes.” Archaeological Journal 165.1: 520–535. Mawrey Gillian, and Linden Groves, 2010. The Gardens of English Heritage. London: Frances Lincoln Limited. Minter, Sue, 2004. “Sustainable Tourism and Botanic Gardens: A Win-Win Situation?” Botanic Gardens Conservation International 1.1. www.bgci.org/resources/ article/0406/ Morris, Richard K., 2010. Kenilworth Castle: English Heritage Guidebooks. London: English Heritage. National Trust Annual Report, 2014/15. www.nationaltrust.org.uk/documents/ annual-report-2014-15.pdf Rees, Sian, 2010. “Haverfordwest Priory.” Archaeological Journal 167: 68–71. Richardson, Amanda, 2005. The Forest, Park and Palace of Clarendon, c.1200– c.1650: Reconstructing an Actual, Conceptual and Documented Wiltshire Landscape. Oxford: BAR. Richardson, Shaun, and Ed Dennison, 2014. “A Wall with a View? The Gardens at Ravensworth Castle, North Yorkshire.” Landscape History 35.2: 21–38. Snell, Sue, and The Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury, 2005. The Gardens at Hatfield. London: Frances Lincoln. Taylor, Christopher, 2000. “Medieval Ornamental Landscapes.” Landscapes 1.1: 38–55. Watkins, John, and Tom Wright, eds., 2007. The Management and Maintenance of Historic Parks, Gardens and Landscapes: The English Heritage Handbook. London: Frances Lincoln. Woodhouse, Elisabeth, 2008. “Propaganda in Paradise: The Symbolic Garden Created by the Earl of Leicester at Kenilworth, Warwickshire.” Garden History 36.1: 94–113.

10 Report on a Pilot Study of the Garden as a Place of Health and Well-Being Sara Jones

Background Studies to explore the relationship between green space and human health using a range of methods and disciplinary approaches at different scales have increased over recent decades. Organizations such as the James Hutton Institute in Dundee have investigated how green space can have wideranging positive impacts on public health suggesting ways that green space can be integrated into modern landscapes and modern lives (www.hutton. ac.uk/research/projects/green-health), while other studies have reported that gardening has a therapeutic effect on physical, psychological, and social health, which can, from a long-term perspective, alleviate and prevent various health issues facing today’s society (Soga, Gaston and Yamaura 2017). Studies into the real effects of therapeutic gardening on the elderly have reported the benefits of horticultural therapy and garden settings in the reduction of pain, improvement in attention, lessening of stress, modulation of agitation, lowering of as needed medications and antipsychotics, and reduction of falls in the elderly. This suggests that time spent in the garden either working or just being in a garden can improve their health (Detweiler et al. 2012. Other medical studies have also focused on stewardship and how gardening increases health, community awareness, and a connection to future generations providing a valuable insight into how the humanities and science can work together in a symbiotic relationship and shed light on contemporary health issues (Wright and Wadsworth 2014). Among the more general studies such as those that report on improved “well-being,” for example, increased positivity, relaxation, decreased psychological stress, and improved cognitive function, there are also targeted studies on the health benefits, such as decreased risk of cardiovascular disease, decreased blood pressure, decreased cortisol levels, and lower levels of depression and anxiety (Bowler, Buyung-Ali, Knight and Pullin 2010; Ward-Thompson et al. 2012; Irvine, Warber, Devine-Wright and Gaston 2013; Pasanen, Tyrvainen and Korpela 2014; Whear et al. 2014; Bratman, Daily, Levy and Gross 2015). There are reported benefits associated with being outside in a green space, garden, or spending time close to nature. The

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aim of the pilot study undertaken at Swansea was to explore the effects of an outdoor garden space on relaxation, health, and well-being and, in turn, to offer further insight into how later medieval and early modern gardens may have had a positive, and largely undocumented impact to date, on the health and well-being of their creators, owners, and users.

Measures The study used a within-subjects design, to measure the effects of resting and relaxation in a quiet room compared with resting and relaxing an outdoor garden. The independent variable in the experiment was the location (Room/Garden). The outcome measures examined both the objective physical signs of stress and relaxation and the participants’ subjective experiences. Outcome Measure 1: Blood Pressure and Heart Rate It is well known that elevated blood pressure (BP) and heart rate can be symptoms of stress and anxiety and may be detrimental to health if they remain elevated for long periods (Gorman and Sloan 2000; Sparrenberger et al. 2009; Yano et al. 2016). There is also some evidence that resting and relaxation may reduce blood pressure and heart rate (Dickinson et al. 2008). Systolic blood pressure is the “top number” in the blood pressure reading and is the number affected by an acute stress reaction and decreases following relaxation (Wright, O’Brien, Hazi and Kent 2014). Therefore, systolic blood pressure and heart rate were measured before and after resting both indoors and outside, in order to determine if any reduction or degree of reduction, after resting, was dependent on the indoor/outdoor location. Outcome Measure 2: Participants’ Reported Feelings of Well-being The study also aimed to measure any differences between participants’ perceived well-being before and after resting indoors or outdoors. As this is a small pilot study a very short questionnaire comprising a simple scale of “feelings” was designed by the researchers. To measure the intensity of their feelings, participants were asked to rate them on a Likert scale from “not at all” to “extremely.” Twelve items were measured with the prefix “I feel”: irritated, alert, nervous, depressed, content, bored, stressed, calm, relaxed, tired, happy, and motivated, which were presented in a random order (see Appendix 1). As this is a new tool designed for this study, it is the first time it has been used and has such not been previously been tested for validity or reliability. However, Likert scales are a commonly used tool in social science research to measure intensity of feelings/opinions (Bryman 2012) and have been used in other questionnaires that measure, happiness, levels of stress, or well-being (Hills and Argyle 2002; Roberti, Harrington and Storch 2006; Tennant et al. 2007).

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The questionnaire also included some demographic information for example age and gender and checked for exclusion criteria (taking any medications). The participants were also asked what activity they had done prior to coming to the session; if they had eaten, drunk, or smoked in the last hour; and whether they engage in mindfulness, meditation, or yoga normally. This information was asked as these factors might affect the participants’ blood pressure, heart rate, or their ability to relax and thus confound the results.

Participants Participants were students and staff from Swansea University in South Wales. They were recruited via posters that were placed around the university and through a university-wide e-mail. Twenty people responded to the advertisement; however, only eighteen people completed the study (two people were unable to attend the second session and so were excluded). There was a wide age range in the sample as represented in Figure 10.1. Participants were predominantly female (n = 16) and came from a range of different disciplines of study. Exclusion criteria were taking medication for blood pressure or for mental health. All participants gave informed consent prior to inclusion in the study. Age range 18–25 26–35 36–45 46–55 56–65 Over 65

Total 4 5 2 4 3 0 18

Male 1 1 0 0 0 0 2

Female 3 4 2 4 3 0 16

Figure 10.1 Age and Gender Profile of Participants

Procedure Participants were asked to attend two sessions as follows: Stage 1: Each participant was given an appointment time to attend a room in the university straight from doing some work/activity (i.e. it was requested that they did not attend immediately after having had a break). The room was a quiet office space with a desk and chair and minimal environmental distractions. Participants’ blood pressure and heart rate were checked by the researcher (who is a registered nurse), and the questionnaire (the “feelings” scale) was completed by

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the participant. The participant was then left in the room alone and instructed to try to relax for ten minutes. They were asked not to use their mobile phones, read books, or have any other distractions. After ten minutes, the researcher re-entered the room and checked the participant’s blood pressure and heart rate again and the “feelings” scale was repeated. Stage 2: On another day (organized on days when the weather was dry and relatively warm) the process of stage 1 was repeated, but instead of meeting in the room each participant was appointed to meet the researcher in an outdoor garden in the university where there are benches to sit. Blood pressure, heart rate measurements, and the “feelings” scale questionnaire were undertaken before and after resting for ten minutes, but this time the ten-minute rest took place outside. Again participants were left alone and asked not to use mobile phones or other distractions.

Data Analysis Descriptive statistics were calculated and presented in the following (see Findings). Findings are presented in relation to the following hypotheses: Outcome Measure 1: Blood Pressure and Heart Rate The hypothesis is that there would be a greater reduction in systolic blood pressure and heart rate after resting outdoors, as opposed to resting indoors. Outcome Measure 2: Participants’ Reported Feelings of Well-being In order to quantify the feelings score for analysis the answers were divided into “positive” and “negative” feelings and given scores as illustrated in Figure 10.2. The hypothesis is that there would be a greater increase in the “positive” feelings score and a greater decrease in the “negative” feelings score after resting in the garden when compared with resting in the room. “Positive” feelings Alert, Content, Calm, Relaxed, Happy, Motivated Not at all A bit Moderately A lot Extremely

1 2 3 4 5

Figure 10.2 Subjective “Feelings” Tested

“Negative” feelings Irritated, Nervous, Depressed, Bored, Stressed, Tired 1 2 3 4 5

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Findings Outcome Measure 1: Blood Pressure and Heart Rate The findings from the blood pressure and heart rate data are presented in Figure 10.3. After resting in the garden fifteen people (83.3%) experienced a decrease in their systolic blood pressure (SBP) by an average (mean) of 11.2 mmHg. This is compared with only ten people (55.5%) whose SBP decreased after resting in the room and by a slightly smaller average (mean) of 10.9 mmHg. This suggests that resting in the garden may be more effective at reducing SBP than the room and that the decrease may also be greater after resting in the garden than in the room. Some people, both in the room and in the garden experienced an increase in their SBP after resting; however, only one person experienced this after resting in the garden, compared with five people after resting in the room. Furthermore, the increase in SBP was only 2 mmHg for the person after resting in the garden, compared with a mean increase of 11.6 mmHg measured in the people after resting in the room. So although an increase in blood pressure after resting is an undesirable effect, it occurred less frequently and with a lesser effect in the garden as opposed to the room. Three people when in the room and two people when in the garden experienced no effect on their blood pressure post resting. In the garden ten people (55.5%) experienced a reduction in their heart rate by an average (mean) of 7.5 bpm (beats per minute) whereas eight

SBP reduced SBP after resting remained n, % the same after resting n, % Room 10, 3, 55.5% 16.7% Garden 15, 2, 83.3% 11.1% By how much? mmHg Mean Room 10.9 mmHg Garden 11.2 mmHg

SBP increased After resting n, %

HR reduced after resting n, %

5, 27.8% 1, 5.6% By how much? mmHg Mean 11.6 mmHg 2 mmHg

8, 44.4% 10, 55.5% By how much? bpm Mean 12.3 bpm 7.5 bpm

HR remained the same after resting n, % 3, 16.7% 4, 22.2%

HR increased After resting n, % 7, 38.9% 4, 22.2% By how much? bpm Mean 11.7 bpm 7.25 bpm

Figure 10.3 Comparing Systolic Blood Pressure and Heart Rates Before and After Rest Note: SBP = systolic blood pressure, measured in mmHg (millimetres of mercury); HR = heart rate, measured in bpm (beats per minute).

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people (44.4%) in the room experienced a HR reduction by a larger average of 12.3 bpm. This suggests that while more people in the garden experienced a reduction in their HR, the reduction was greater in the room. Some people, both in the room and the garden experienced an increase in their HR after resting. For the four people in the garden whose HR increased after resting, this increase was only by mean of 7.25 bpm, compared with the seven people whose HR went up after resting by a mean of 11.7 bpm. While HR increase is an undesirable effect, it occurred with less frequency and with a lesser effect in the garden than in the room. Three people in the room and four people when in the garden experienced no difference in their HR post resting. Outcome Measure 2: Participants’ Reported Feelings of Well-being The findings from the feelings scale data are presented in Figure 10.4. In the garden ten (55.5%) people experienced a decrease in the “negative” feelings (mean difference in score = 1.4) whereas only five people in the room experienced a decrease (in this case the mean difference was also slightly smaller at 1.16). The garden therefore appears to be more effective at reducing negative feelings. For five people in the room and three people in the garden, there was no difference in their negative feeling scores. In the garden fifteen people (83.3%) experienced an increase in the “positive” feelings (mean difference in score = 5.2) and ten people (55.5%) in the room experienced an increase (the mean difference in this group was also smaller at 2.8). The garden therefore appears to be more effective at increasing positive feelings, and this increase in score is greater in the garden than in the room. For two people in the room and three people in the garden, there was no difference in their positive feeling scores. Negative feelings reduced after resting n, % Room Garden

Room Garden

6, 33.3% 10, 55.5% By how much? Mean score 1.16 1.4

Negative feelings remained the same after resting n, % 5, 27.8% 3, 16.7%

Negative feelings increased after resting n, %

Positive feelings increased after resting n, %

7, 38.9% 5, 27.8% By how much? Mean score 3 2.4

10, 55.5% 15, 83.3% By how much? Mean score

Positive feelings remained the same after resting n, % 2, 11.1% 3, 16.7%

2.8 5.2

Figure 10.4 Comparing Feelings of Well-Being Before and After Resting

Positive feelings reduced After resting n, % 6, 33.3% 0 By how much? Mean score 3 0

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Limitations These results would benefit from statistical analysis using a statistics package to examine if these apparent differences are statistically significant (i.e., are unlikely to have happened by chance). They should also be interpreted with caution because of the small sample size and the potential effects of variables and confounds (such as age, prior activity before the rest, temperature on the day, and unknown variation of emotional stressors on the two different days). However, on initial inspection these results are promising and may reveal the potential beneficial effects of resting in an outdoor space when compared with resting indoors.

Bibliography Bowler, D. E., L. M. Buyung-Ali, T. M. Knight, and A. S. Pullin, 2010. “A Systematic Review of Evidence for the Added Benefits to Health of Exposure to Natural Environments.” BMC Public Health 10.456: 1–10. doi:10.1186/1471-2458-10-456. Bratman, G. N., G. C. Daily, B. J. Levy, and J. J. Gross, 2015. “The Benefits of Nature Experience: Improved Affect and Cognition.” Landscape and Urban Planning 138: 41–50. Bryman, A., 2012. Social Research Methods. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Detweiler, Mark B., Taral Sharmer, Jonna G. Detweiler, Pamela F. Murphy, Sandra Lane, Jack Carman, Amara S. Chudhary, Mary M. Halling, and Kye Y. Kim, 2012. “What Is the Evidence to Support the Use of Therapeutic Gardens in the Elderly.” Psychiatry Investigation 9.2: 100–110. Dickinson, H. O., F. R. Beyer, G. A. Ford, D. Nicholson, F. Cambell, J. V. Cook, and J. Mason, 2008. “Relaxation for High Blood Pressure in Adults Which Has No Clearly Identified Cause.” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 1. doi: 10.1002/14651858.CD004935.pub2 Gorman, J. M., and R. P. Sloan, 2000. “Heart Rate Variability in Depressive and Anxiety Disorders.” American Heart Journal 140.4: S77–S83. doi: http://doi. org/10.1067/mhj.2000.109981 Hills, P., and M. Argyle, 2002. “The Oxford Happiness Questionnaire: A Compact Scale for the Measurement of Psychological Well-Being.” Personality and Individual Differences 33: 1073–1082. doi: http://doi.org/10.1016/S01918869(01)00213-6. Irvine, K. N., S. L. Warber, P. Devine-Wright, and K. J. Gaston, 2013. “Understanding Urban Green Space as a Health Resource: A Qualitative Comparison of Visit Motivation and Derived Effects among Park Users in Sheffield, UK.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 10.1: 417–442. Pasanen, T. P., L. Tyrvainen, and K. M. Korpela, 2014. “The Relationship between Perceived Activity Indoors, Outdoors in Built Environments, and Outdoors in Nature.” Health and Wellbeing 6.3: 324–326. doi: 10.1111/aphw.12031 Roberti, J. W., L. N. Harrington, and E. Storch, 2006. “Further Psychometric Support for the 10-Item Version of the Perceived Stress Scale.” Journal of College Counselling 9: 135–147. doi: 10.1002/j.2161-1882.2006.tb00100.x Soga, Masashi, Kevin J. Gaston, and Yuichi Yamaura, 2017. “Gardening Is Beneficial for Health: A Meta-Analysis.” Preventive Medicine Reports 5: 92–99. Sparrenberger, F., F. T. Cichelero, A. M. Ascoli, F. P. Fonseca, G. Weiss, O. Berwanger, S. C. Fuchs, L. B. Moreira, and F. D. Fuchs, 2009. “Does Psychosocial Stress Cause Hypertension? A Systematic Review of Observational Studies.” Journal of Human Hypertension 23: 12–19. doi: 10.1038/jhh.2008.74

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Tennant, R., L. Hiller, R. Fishwick, S. Platt, S. Joseph, S. Weich, J. Parkinson, J. Secker, and S. Stewart-Brown, 2007. “The Warwick-Edinburgh Mental WellBeing Scale (WEMWBS): Development and UK Validation.” Health and Quality of Life Outcomes 5: 63. doi: 10.1186/1477-7525-5-63 Ward-Thompson, C., J. Roe, P. Aspinall, R. Mitchell, A. Clow, and D. Miller, 2012. “More Green Space Is Linked to Less Stress in Deprived Communities: Evidence from Salivary Cortisol Patterns.” Landscape and Urban Planning 105.3: 221– 229. doi: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2011.12.015 Whear, R., J. Thompson Coon, A. Bethel, R. Abbott, K. Stein, and R. Garside, 2014. “What Is the Impact of Using Outdoor Spaces Such as Gardens on the Physical and Mental Well-Being of Those with Dementia? A Systematic Review of Quantitative and Qualitative Evidence.” Journal of the American Medical Directors Association 15.10: 697–705. doi: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jamda.2014.05.013 Wright, B. J., S. O’Brien, A. Hazi, and S. Kent, 2014. “Increased Systolic Blood Pressure Reactivity to Acute Stress Is Related with Better Self-Reported Health.” Scientific Reports 4: 6882. doi: 10.1038/srep06882 Wright, Scott D., and Amy Maida Wadsworth, 2014. “Gray and Green Revisited: A Multidisciplinary Perspective of Gardens, Gardening, and the Aging Process.” Journal of Aging Research, 6 March. doi: 10.1155/2014/283682 Yano, Y., H. Ning, J. P. Reis, C. E. Lewis, L. J. Launer, N. Bryan, K. Yaffe, S. Sidney, E. Albanese, P. Greenland, D. Lloyd-Jones, and K. Liu, 2016. “Blood Pressure Reactivity to Psychological Stress in Young Adults and Cognition in Midlife: The Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) Study.” Journal of the American Heart Association 5.1: 1–54. doi: https://doi.org/10.1161/ JAHA.115.002718

Appendix 1 Questionnaire

Some Questions About You Please tick the box: 1) Are you? Male  or Female  2) How old are you? 18–25  26–35  36–45  46–55  56–65  Over 65  3) Do you take medications for blood pressure/ your heart? Yes  No  4) Do you take medication for your mental health/ depression/ anxiety? Yes  No  5) What was the last activity you did before coming here today? Please write below: (e.g. attend lecture/ teaching/ meeting/ writing/ answering emails/ coffee/lunch break)

6) In the last hour have you a) Eaten? Yes  No  b) Drunk any tea/coffee/caffeinated drinks? Yes  No  c) Smoked? Yes  No  7) Do you regularly engage in any meditative practices in your daily life such as yoga, meditation or mindfulness? Yes  No  If ‘Yes’, please outline below:

Some Questions About How You Feel Please respond with the one answer which most accurately describes how you feel AT THE MOMENT.

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Before Resting Not at all

A bit

Moderately

A lot

Extremely

Irritated

I feel:

1

2

3

4

5

Alert

1

2

3

4

5

Nervous

1

2

3

4

5

Depressed

1

2

3

4

5

Content

1

2

3

4

5

Bored

1

2

3

4

5

Stressed

1

2

3

4

5

Calm

1

2

3

4

5

Relaxed

1

2

3

4

5

Tired

1

2

3

4

5

Happy

1

2

3

4

5

Motivated

1

2

3

4

5

After Resting Not at all

A bit

Moderately

A lot

Extremely

Irritated

I feel:

1

2

3

4

5

Alert

1

2

3

4

5

Nervous

1

2

3

4

5

Depressed

1

2

3

4

5

Content

1

2

3

4

5

Bored

1

2

3

4

5

Stressed

1

2

3

4

5

Calm

1

2

3

4

5

Relaxed

1

2

3

4

5

Tired

1

2

3

4

5

Happy

1

2

3

4

5

Motivated

1

2

3

4

5

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8) If you answered ‘Yes’ to Q.7: ‘Do you regularly engage in any meditative practices in your daily life’; did you use any of these techniques to relax during your ten minutes rest? 1) Yes  No  If ‘Yes’, please outline below:

For Completion by Research Assistant Before Rest Blood Pressure (mmHg) Heart Rate (bpm)

After Rest

Contributors

Daisy Black is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Wolverhampton. She is currently working on a monograph on time and gender in medieval religious drama, and completed her PhD at the University of Manchester. Her other research interests include food in performance, periodization and memory, medieval depictions of Jews and Saracens, narratives of cannibalism, and medievalism in modern board game culture. Daisy also works as a theatre director, storyteller, and playwright. Emily Cock has just commenced a three-year Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship in the history department at Cardiff University. Her PhD investigated prostitution and plastic surgery in early modern England, and she has since published articles in Social History of Medicine and BMJ Humanities. Sara Wyn Jones is registered nurse and health visitor and is currently conducting a PhD in Public Health at Swansea University. She has worked in Greece as a volunteer with new mothers in refugee camps for the Nurture Project International and as a paid intern for the “Enclosed Garden” project at Swansea. Liz Herbert McAvoy is a professor of medieval English literature at Swansea University and is the director of the research project “The Enclosed Garden: Pleasure, Contemplation and Cure in the Hortus Conclusus, 1100– 1450,” supported by the Leverhulme Trust. She is a specialist in medieval women’s literature and has published extensively on how representations of gender are played out within medieval texts by, for and about women. She recently coedited, with Diane Watt, The History of British Women’s Writing, 700–1500, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2015. Amy Louise Morgan is a lecturer in Medieval Literature at the University of Surrey where she completed her PhD in 2017. Her research interests include queer theory, gender, time and space, medieval romance, medieval women, medieval monsters, and the supernatural. She is currently working on a monograph which examines queer time and space in medieval literary texts.

Contributors

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Eoin Price is a lecturer in English Literature at Swansea University specializing in Renaissance drama. He is the author of ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England: The Politics of Publication (Palgrave, 2015). His work also appears in Literature Compass, The Map of Early Modern London, Early Theatre and The Year’s Work in English Studies. Manuel Schwembacher is an assistant for Medieval German Language and Literature at the University of Salzburg, where he also works in the “Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für Mittelalter und Frühneuzeit.” He has published on the topic of medieval gardens in literature and art, is coauthor of Die mittelalterlichen Handschriften des Stiftes Nonnberg in Salzburg (The Medieval Manuscripts of the Nonnberg Abbey in Salzburg; Vienna, 2018), and is now writing his PhD thesis on the presentation, functionality, and perception of gardens in selected medieval literature. Patricia Skinner holds a personal chair in History at Swansea University and is director of the “Effaced from History?” project on the history of disfigurement. Her research interests range across health, medicine, and gender in the Middle Ages, and her book Living with Disfigurement in the Early Middle Ages was published by Palgrave in 2017. She worked as a historical advisor on the “Enclosed Garden” project at Swansea. Spencer Gavin Smith is the Archaeology and Monuments Officer for the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust. He is a former investigator with the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales and has worked as an archaeologist and surveyor in both the public and private sectors. Spencer regularly contributes to television and radio program in both English and Welsh. He is currently researching his PhD on the topic of “Parks, Gardens and Designed Landscapes of Medieval North Wales and North West Shropshire” at Manchester Metropolitan University. Theresa Tyers was awarded her PhD by the University of Nottingham in 2012. She specializes in late medieval and early modern vernacular recipe collections, recently publishing an article on infertility in Social History of Medicine, and now works as a research fellow on the “Enclosed Garden” project at Swansea University.

Index

Aberglasney, Wales 9 Adam 11, 21, 22, 25, 75, 76, 103–107, 109–120; “Adambooks” 22 agency 22, 24, 92, 94, 96, 99, 114 angels 22, 105, 115–117 Anglo-Saxon 4, 9 animals 6, 70, 71, 79, 80, 85, 91, 124; deer 46, 72 apples see fruit archaeology i, 4, 9, 11, 41, 44–52, 82, 91, 136, 138–139, 145 Babylon 18 Banham, Debbie 9 bathing 20, 66 Bayleaf Farmhouse, Sussex, England 135, 147 beauty 4, 8, 10, 11, 23, 28, 30, 31, 60, 65, 84, 85, 92, 97, 99, 100, 115, 116, 125, 126 bees 80, 127 Benedict, St., Rule of 6, 7, 19, 27 Bible 6, 10, 19, 20–23, 29, 30, 97, 102, 104, 108, 112 birds 27, 31, 66, 97; doves 27, 147; swans 48 Bishop’s Palace Garden, Lincoln, England 148 Bliss, Mildred Wood 4 blood 22, 29, 30, 33, 80, 99, 100, 131; blood pressure 155–159 Bollard, Nicholas 6 Book of Spiritual Grace 28–32, 34–35 Borchardt, Rudolph 21 botanists see Bollard, Nicholas; Landsberg, Sylvia botany 3, 76, 123, 125, 127, 128, 131, 150 Brathwait, Richard 128 Brittany 11, 91

Brown, Michael (garden designer) 147 Bruno, St 7 Burgwinkle, William 96 burial 7, 21; of bodies 7, 20, 24, 30; of objects 7 Bussy D’Ambois 124 Butterworth, Phillip 104–106, 114 Byzantium 19 castles 5, 11, 41–55, 92, 130, 135, 137, 141–145, 151; Beaumaris, Wales 41; Caernarfon, Wales 41, 43, 47–49; Conwy, Wales 41, 46–47, 50, 51, 52; Dolbadarn, Wales 42, 44, 51; Harlech, Wales 41, 49–51; Holt, Wales 43; Kenilworth, Warwickshire, England 135, 136, 141–145; Ravensworth, N. Yorks, England 137, 141–145; Rhuddlan, Wales 44–46; Richmond, N. Yorks, England 148–149; Tintagel, Cornwall, England 52; Winchester, England 137, 145, 146 caterpillars 76, 78, 127, 129 Cecil, Sir William 126 Chapman, George 124 Charles I, king of England 129 Chaucer, Geoffrey 93 Clark, Frank (garden designer) 135 Cockerill, Sara 42 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 24 color 8, 23, 27, 28, 57, 59, 61 Colvin, Howard 41 compost 50 containers 9, 52, 77, 83, 149; see also pottery costume 104–105, 107, 119 courtly love 20, 93, 94–96, 100 Crane, Mary Thomas 124 Creighton, Oliver H. 8, 91, 92, 138, 141

Index crime 73; assault 73; theft 71, 73; violence 73, 77 crucifixion 29–31 crusades 20, 60 cultivation 5, 6, 11, 19, 56, 57, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 71, 82, 83, 91, 97, 152 Dafydd ap Gwilym, poet 42–43 D’Aronco, Maria 4 Dedowens, Rembert 125 Denny Abbey, Cambs., England 141 Derrida, Jacques 17, 18, 19, 24, 31, 36 design 5, 9, 46, 47, 48, 50, 56, 58, 66, 70, 82, 85, 92, 102, 124, 136, 137–139, 141, 142, 145–146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151 Diamond, Arlyn 92 Dinshaw, Carolyn 97, 98, 100 display 5, 51, 94, 100, 138 ditches 45, 72, 91, 136 Dobson, Michael 123 Doty, Jeffrey 129 drama 11, 30, 31, 34, 104, 105, 106, 110, 112, 113, 115, 120, 123–132; see also plays drinking 34, 35, 51, 84, 108, 141, 163 Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC, US 4 earth see soil eating 30, 51, 66, 108, 116, 118 ecocriticism 124 Eden, Garden of 6, 10, 11, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27, 29, 35, 70, 79, 102–122 Edward I, king of England 41, 42, 46, 60, 146 Edward III, king of England 7, 8, 10 Egypt 18 Eleanor of Castile, queen 42, 46, 50, 146 elements see weather Elvetham 77 emotion 66, 103, 108, 150, 161; see also feelings enclosure 4, 6, 16, 18, 19, 21, 24, 26, 44, 50, 70, 71–74, 85, 91, 92, 104, 120, 139, 142; see also ditches; fences; fences; trellis; walls English Heritage Contemporary Garden Scheme 135, 148–149 English Husbandman, The 127 environmentalism i, 4, 5, 11, 51 Epic of Gilgamesh 23–24 Eve 6, 11, 21, 22–25, 75, 79, 102–122 Evelyn, John 70, 72, 75–76, 77–78, 82–83 exegesis 25, 30, 35

169

fantasy 113–114 feelings 108, 151, 156–158, 160; see also emotion fences 6, 45, 46, 71–73, 80, 91, 94, 98, 149 fertility 6, 8, 17, 18, 20, 23, 62 Findon, Joanne 115 Fletcher, John 78 Flower of Friendship, The 128 flowers 7, 8, 9, 19, 20, 23, 29, 30, 46, 56, 58, 59, 60–63, 64, 66, 72, 75, 84, 85, 97, 105, 107, 123, 126, 139, 146, 147; lavender 62, 107, 144, 148; lily 8, 11, 57, 58, 59, 62–63, 65, 66, 107; rose 6, 8, 11, 20, 57–59, 60–62, 63, 64–66, 84, 107, 137, 146, 147, 150 food, cultivation of 5, 19, 57, 67, 70, 73, 81 forest 98, 124 Foucault, Michel 29 fountains see water France 11, 62, 64, 65, 149 Francis, Mark 16 fruit 6, 18, 23, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 42, 64, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 83, 91, 92, 105, 120, 127, 137; apples 6, 73, 98, 108, 109, 116; apricots 128; dates 108, 109; oranges 109; strawberries 11, 57, 58, 63–65 gardeners 3, 8, 10, 11, 16, 64, 70, 71, 74, 76–80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 98, 124, 125, 126, 128, 129–131, 149 Gascoigne, George 74, 80, 84 gaze 59, 93, 94, 106, 108 gender 1, 6, 8, 11, 16–38, 58, 75, 84, 91–92, 94, 96, 114, 117, 151–152, 157 Gentleman of Venice, The 125, 129–131 Gerard, John 81, 123, 125–127, 129, 131 Gertrude of Helfta 17, 26–30, 32–36 Glastonbury, Somerset, England 9 Gouge, William 127 grafting 6, 33, 74, 75, 76, 97, 98 Griffiths, Mark 123, 125, 131 Guillaume de Lorris 20 Gwynedd, Wales 41–52 Halberstam, Jack/Judith 94, 95 Hampton Court, London, England 136 Harris, Richard (garden designer) 147 Hartlib, Samuel 71–77, 83 Harvey, John 4, 41, 56, 58, 60, 137, 145

170

Index

Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, England 47, 142 hats 84–86 Haverfordwest Priory, Wales 137–139, 142, 152 healing see medicine health 3, 4, 12, 57–58, 67, 70–71, 74, 79, 82–83, 85–86, 107, 155–161 hedges 29, 47, 71–73, 76, 91, 98, 130, 141, 144, 146 Helfta, monastery 17, 26–36 Herald of Divine Love 26–36 herbals 4, 57, 60, 62, 80, 81, 84, 125; see also Gerard, John herbarium / herber / herber 45, 46, 58, 84, 107, 145–146, 147 herbs 9, 11, 12, 58–59, 63, 66, 73, 102, 107, 127, 147, 152 Hester, Randolph T., Jnr 16, 17 heterotopia 6, 10, 29 Hildegard of Bingen 107 Hill, Thomas 70–71, 73 Hoby, Lady Margaret 72 honey 29, 32, 65, 79; see also bees hortus conclusus 11, 16, 19–24, 26–28, 30–32, 35, 94, 120, 138, 151–152 hunting 5, 42, 80, 84 hybridity 91, 98, 100 iconography 9, 20, 21, 27, 30, 116, 152 illusion 16, 17, 25 illustrations 6, 7, 10, 47, 59, 76, 77, 78, 81, 84, 85, 91, 136, 139, 146 imprisonment 6, 73, 149, 152 incense 106–107 insects 10, 72, 78–79, 127; see also bees intruders 6, 91, 97, 100 Ireland 22 Irigaray, Luce 17, 21, 24–26, 30, 35, 94, 99 irrigation see water Jantzen, Grace 17, 25, 29 Jean de Meun 20 Joan, wife of Llewelyn ab Iorwerth 42, 44 John, king of England 44, 52 Kenilworth see castles Kinoshita, Sharon 94 labor 16, 19, 64, 70, 71, 74–78, 84–86, 109, 111, 114, 119, 129–131; weeding 64, 70, 75, 77, 81–82, 85; see also weeds

lais 11, 91–92, 94, 96 Landsberg, Sylvia 9–10, 45, 137, 142, 145–147 landscape 3–5, 18, 20, 41–42, 45, 47, 52, 57, 63–64, 66–67, 71, 77, 91, 102, 142, 148, 155 language 3, 5, 6, 17, 18, 22, 25, 28, 32–34, 36, 103, 118, 127, 129 Lanval 91, 92–96 lawns 9, 45–47, 58–59, 85 law of Hywel Dda 42 Lawson, William 70–77, 80–81, 85 layout see design Leicester, England 7, 143 Liddiard, Robert 10, 42, 52 liminality 10, 11, 91, 98 Llewelyn ab Iorwerth 41–44 London, England 7–10, 73, 107, 123 love 8, 10, 19, 20, 24, 26–29, 33–35, 50, 57, 61, 111, 114, 115, 149, 151; see also courtly love Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, England 9 Magnani, Roberta 94 Mankind 112–113 manuals 10, 11, 70–71, 74, 77, 82, 85, 86 manure 64, 79, 82 maps 7, 44, 45, 47–49, 52 Marie de France 91–94, 100 Markham, Gervase 79, 127 Marvell, Andrew 123–124 Mary, Virgin 6, 8, 23, 115, 149, 152 Mary Magdalen 20, 115 masculinity 10, 35, 92–96 maternity 21, 22, 24–25, 31–32, 34–35 Maurières, Arnoud (garden designer) 149 McAvoy, Liz Herbert 120, 152 McCracken, Peggy 94–96 McGavin, John 108, 114 McKay, Elaine 113 McLean, Teresa 4, 19, 20, 98 Mechtild of Hackeborn 17, 26, 28–36 medicine 5, 8, 12, 19, 56–57, 58–60, 61–64, 66–67, 70, 79, 81, 86, 107, 147, 149, 155, 157; see also remedies meditation 114, 152, 157, 163 Mesopotamia 18, 23 Milton, John 70, 114 monastic gardens 6, 7, 19, 20, 26, 29, 56, 102, 113, 138, 141, 152; Gilbertine Priory, York, England 141; Mount Grace Priory, N.

Index

171

Yorks, England 135, 137–141, 152; Peterborough Abbey, England 138; Shrewsbury Abbey, England 137– 138; St Gall, Switzerland 7, 9, 19, 27; St Swithuns, Winchester, England 7 Morris, William 136 moss 74, 127 Musée de Cluny, Paris, France 149–151 music 103, 119

ploughing 127 Pogue Harrison, Robert 19, 21–22, 24–25, 27 politics 17, 91, 123–126, 128–129, 131 pottery 46 prayer 19, 28, 35 Prebendal Manor, Northants, England 135, 138, 141, 145, 147 psychology 35, 66, 102, 155

National Trust 4, 136, 150 nature 58, 67, 91, 97, 112, 115, 124, 150, 155 Naumburg Cathedral, Germany 135, 150 New York City, US 20, 102 Normans 3, 44 Norwich, England 11, 102–122 novelty 3, 6

Queen Eleanor’s Garden, Winchester, England 135, 137, 145–146, 151

orchards 5, 7, 11, 19, 70, 72–74, 77, 91–101, 147; see also fruit Ossart, Eric (garden designer) 149 Otherworld 91, 96, 98–99 Oxford, England 3, 80 pageant 11, 102, 104–111, 114–120, 143 paint 103, 104–105, 144 Palladius 10 Paradise 18–23, 27, 56, 63, 75, 110, 113, 115, 118 Paradise Lost 114 Parkinson, John 75–76 parks 5, 44, 56, 61, 63, 102; see also hunting perfume 57–62, 64, 66–67, 84, 103, 106, 107–109; see also incense Persia 18 pests 6, 11, 70, 78, 79; see also caterpillars physic gardens 19, 80, 126; College of Physicians 81, 126 plants: identification of 9, 58, 80–81, 150; symbolism of 8, 19, 62, 146, 149 Plat, Sir Hugh 83 plays 8, 102, 117, 123–125, 129–131; Chester 115; Norwich Grocers’ 102–122; N-Town 115; Towneley 115; York 115; see also drama pleasure 5–7, 18, 27, 45, 56–57, 59–60, 64–67, 71, 74, 80, 91–92, 95–96, 100, 103–110, 112, 115–116, 118–120, 128, 141, 142, 146–147, 151

Ravensworth see castles Rawcliffe, Carole 107, 113 records 7, 8, 42–45, 47–49, 60–61, 64, 66–67, 120, 145, 148 re-creation (of gardens) 5, 135–154 recreation 6, 7, 93, 102, 103, 110–120, 151 Reformation, English 3, 103 remedies 58, 61–63, 65, 79, 85; see also medicine Renfrew, Jane 9 repose see rest rest 5, 18, 27, 59, 85, 156, 158–160 restoration 9, 44, 135–154 revivalism 136 Richard II 125, 128–129 Richmond see castles Rimpton, Somerset, England 9 Roman de la Rose 20 rose see flowers rose water 60–62, 65–66, 84 Ryrie, Alex 113 safety 11, 71–72, 75–76, 80, 86, 97, 124, 152 Salisbury, 6th Marchioness of (garden designer) 142 scent see perfume seating 45, 148–149, 158; turf 5, 59, 139, 146 senses 8, 22, 27, 56–69, 103–104, 106–107, 114, 117–118, 120, 137 sexuality 10, 21, 24–25, 29, 33–35, 93–96; adultery 20; sodomy 91, 95–96 shade 18, 19, 51, 84, 85, 91, 97, 148 Shakespeare, William 8, 50, 80, 123–126, 128–129, 131 Shirley, James 125, 129–131 Sidhu, Nicole Nolan 115 Sir Orfeo 91–92, 96–100

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Slade, Harry Gordon (garden designer) 143 snakes 78–79 soil 5, 21, 30, 33, 46, 49, 75, 79, 137, 141; see also manure Soja, Edward 17, 19, 25, 35 Song of Songs 6, 19, 29–30, 32, 34–36, 152 spatiality 10, 16, 17, 110 spectacle 11, 103–106, 110–111, 117, 119 spices 107–108 statecraft see politics strawberry see fruit Stubbes, Philip 72 Swanson, Neil (garden designer) 148 theater 104, 112, 116, 129; see also drama; plays therapy 12, 58–59, 65–66, 155 Thomas, Graham Stuart (garden designer) 136 Tilney, Edmund 128 tools 11, 76–77, 86; forks 76; hoes 64; rakes 76, 85; rollers 76; spades 76–77, 113 Topsell, Edward 79, 84 transgression 11, 21–22, 25, 91–92, 94, 95, 97, 99 trees 18, 27, 30, 32, 43, 56, 58, 71, 74, 76, 78, 83, 85, 91, 92, 98, 144, 146, 148, 149; see also forest; orchards; willow; woodland trellis 6, 59, 64, 82, 84, 86, 146–147 Tretower Court, Crickhowell, Wales 135, 141, 146–147 Turner, Daniel 79–80, 84 Twelfth Night 124 Vaughan, William 127 vegetables 6, 58, 64, 70, 82, 84, 126, 139, 141, 147 vermin see pests

vines 46, 59, 64, 83–84 Virgin Mary see Mary, Virgin visions 26–32, 107 Wales 41–52, 138, 146, 157; see also castles Walker, Greg 108, 114 Walker, Mark Anthony (garden designer) 148 walls 5, 6, 7, 22, 35, 41, 44–52, 56, 71–72, 77, 82, 84–86, 91, 97, 136, 138–139, 141, 144, 146, 148, 152 Wampole, Christy 32 water 7, 18, 27, 33, 46–47, 48–49, 62–64, 74, 77–78, 84, 141, 142, 146; dams 48–49; fishponds 45, 147; fountains 77, 80, 144, 145, 146; irrigation 77, 141; mills 46, 48–49; wells 45, 77 Weald and Downland Museum, W. Sussex, England 8, 147; see also Bayleaf Farmhouse, Sussex, England weather 52, 60, 82–85, 120, 148, 158; rain 71, 75, 78, 82; snow 71–72; sun 18, 23, 26, 51, 70, 71, 82, 84–85, 86, 102, 138 weeds 64, 70, 78, 81, 86, 129; see also labor, weeding well-being 3, 4, 6, 67, 155–156, 158–160 Whittle, Elisabeth (garden designer) 147 willow 42 Wilton, Wiltshire 9 woodland 81, 124 Woolfson, Jonathan 127 work see labor Worlidge, John 77 York, England 105, 115, 139, 141 As You Like It 124 Zeuner, Christoph (garden designer) 147