In this study, Kari Boyd McBride defines 'country house discourse' as a network of fictions that articulated and mediated early modern concerns about the right use of land and the social relationships that land engendered. McBride provides new perspectives on the roles of the discourse she identifies, linking it with a number of larger historical shifts during the time period. Her interdisciplinary focus allows her to bring together a wide range of material-including architecture, poetry, oil painting, economic and social history, and proscriptive literature-in order to examine their complex interrelationship, revealing connections unexplored in more narrowly focused studies. McBride delineates the ways in which the country house (on the landscape and in literature) provided a locus for the construction of gender, race, class, and nation. Of particular interest is her focus on women's relationships to the country house: their writing of country house poetry and their representation in that literature; their designing of country houses and their lives within those architectural spaces (whether as lady of the house or domestic servant). One of the most important and promising insights in this study is that country house discourse was not simply static and nostalgic, but actually worked to mediate change. All in all, she presents a fresh and detailed study of the great disparities between country house reality and the ideals that informed country house discourse.

McBride provides new perspectives on the roles of the country house discourse she identifies, linking it with a number of larger historical shifts during the time period. Her interdisciplinary focus allows her to bring together a wide range of material - including architecture, poetry, oil painting, economic and social history, and proscriptive literature - in order to examine their complex interrelationship, revealing connections unexplored in more narrowly focused studies.

Our built environment inspires writers to reflect on the human experience, discover its history, or make it up. Buildings tell stories. Castles, country homes, churches, and monasteries are “documents” of the people who built them, owned them, lived and died in them, inherited and saved or destroyed them, and recorded their histories. Literature and Architecture in Early Modern England examines the relationship between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century architectural and literary works. By becoming more sensitive to the narrative functions of architecture, Anne M. Myers argues, we begin to understand how a range of writers viewed and made use of the material built environment that surrounded the production of early modern texts in England. Scholars have long found themselves in the position of excusing or explaining England’s failure to achieve the equivalent of the Italian Renaissance in the visual arts. Myers proposes that architecture inspired an unusual amount of historiographic and literary production, including poetry, drama, architectural treatises, and diaries. Works by William Camden, Henry Wotton, Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Anne Clifford, and John Evelyn, when considered as a group, are texts that overturn the engrained critical notion that a Protestant fear of idolatry sentenced the visual arts and architecture in England to a state of suspicion and neglect.

Working from a cultural studies perspective, author D. K. Smith here examines a broad range of medieval and Renaissance maps and literary texts to explore the effects of geography on Tudor-Stuart cultural perceptions. He argues that the literary representation of cartographically-related material from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth century demonstrates a new strain, not just of geographical understanding, but of cartographic manipulation, which he terms, "the cartographic imagination." Rather than considering the effects of maps themselves on early modern epistemologies, Smith considers the effects of the activity of mapping-the new techniques, the new expectations of accuracy and precision which developed in the sixteenth century-on the ways people thought and wrote. Looking at works by Spenser, Marlowe, Raleigh, and Marvell among other authors, he analyzes how the growing ability to represent physical space accurately brought with it not just a wealth of new maps, but a new array of rhetorical techniques, metaphors, and associations which allowed the manipulation of texts and ideas in ways never before possible.

Participates in an intellectual history of ecology while prompting a re-evaluation of nature in the early modern period.

Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama investigates the ways in which work became a subject of inquiry on the early modern stage and the processes by which the drama began to forge new connections between labor and subjectivity in the period. The essays assembled here address fascinating and hitherto unexplored questions raised by the subject of labor as it was taken up in the drama of the period: How were laboring bodies and the goods they produced, marketed and consumed represented onstage through speech, action, gesture, costumes and properties? How did plays participate in shaping the identities that situated laboring subjects within the social hierarchy? In what ways did the drama engage with contemporary discourses (social, political, economic, religious, etc.) that defined the cultural meanings of work? How did players and playwrights define their own status with respect to the shifting boundaries between high status/low status, legitimate/illegitimate, profitable/unprofitable, skilled/unskilled, formal/informal, male/female, free/bound, paid/unpaid forms of work? Merchants, usurers, clothworkers, cooks, confectioners, shopkeepers, shoemakers, sheepshearers, shipbuilders, sailors, perfumers, players, magicians, servants and slaves are among the many workers examined in this collection. Offering compelling new readings of both canonical and lesser-known plays in a broad range of genres (including history plays, comedies, tragedies, tragi-comedies, travel plays and civic pageants), this collection considers how early modern drama actively participated in a burgeoning, proto-capitalist economy by staging England's newly diverse workforce and exploring the subject of work itself.

Radical reconfigurations in gardening practice in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England altered the social function of the garden, offering men and women new opportunities for social mobility. While recent work has addressed how middle class men used the garden to attain this mobility, the gendering of the garden during the period has gone largely unexamined. This new study focuses on the developing gendered tension in gardening that stemmed from a shift from the garden as a means of feeding a family, to the garden as an aesthetic object imbued with status. The first part of the book focuses on how practical gardening books proposed methods for planting as they simultaneously represented gardens increasingly hierarchized by gender. The second part of the book looks at how men and women appropriated aesthetic uses of actual gardening in their poetry, and reveals a parallel gendered tension there. Munroe analyzes garden representations in the writings of such manuals writers as Gervase Markham, Thomas Hill, and William Lawson, and such poets as Edmund Spenser, Aemilia Lanyer and Lady Mary Wroth. Investigating gardens, gender and writing, Jennifer Munroe considers not only published literary representations of gardens, but also actual garden landscapes and unpublished evidence of everyday gardening practice. She de-prioritizes the text as a primary means of cultural production, showing instead the relationship between what men and women might imagine possible and represent in their writing, and everyday spatial practices and the spaces men and women occupied and made. In so doing, she also broadens our outlook on whom we can identify and value as producers of early modern social space.

This book provides a varied and rich array of perspectives on a wide range of early modern English social roles and relationships as well as cultural norms and areas of contestation. It demonstrates the many ways in which the attitudes and activities that pertain to the domestic sphere are not in any way peripheral to the study of the period -- domestic arrangements are political arrangements. This rich collection of 11 essays illuminates the many ways in which the domestic sphere served as a stage for playing out the pressing questions that perplexed the writers and thinkers of early modern England -- questions about family (householding, marriage, children and parenting), as well as questions about emerging political realities. While 'home' may seem to invoke blood ties-the mother with a child at her breast or siblings at play -- it is finally the bonds that replace blood that demand the mythos of domestic arrangements in all their variety -- from the legal, social, economic and cultural ties of marriage, sealed by the exchange of women from man to man and house to house, to the relationships of stepparents and stepchildren, to the even more tenuous ties that bind class to class and citizen to citizen.

A single significant Jacobean country house, Theobalds, provides the focus for this study. James Sutton here delves into the cultural and political aspirations of the two men most closely associated with Theobalds: William Cecil, Lord Burghley (1520-1598), who constructed the building, and his second-born son and political scion, Robert, 1st Earl of Salisbury (1563-1612). Attending to the opulent materials and hegemonic spatial codes that enabled Theobalds' fabrication, this book also demonstrates the enormous costs - economic, political, social, but especially familial and personal - of building to envious show in the period. Neither celebrating nor castigating the Cecils' conspicuous consumption at their Hertfordshire estate, the author offers a balanced appraisal of the aesthetic strategies through which they promulgated a family narrative. The forms of display he emphasizes are those in which Theobalds was particularly strong: architecture, gardening, the decorative arts, and above all, the occasional drama. Through its detailed rhetorical analysis of one house and one family, this book provides a fresh view of the complex passage from Elizabethan to Jacobean style. poetics, Materializing Space at an Early Modern Prodigy House deepens our understanding of how early modern English men and women chose to be represented, both to themselves and to others.