Full Description
At court, flowers coloured, scented, adorned, sustained, nourished, and enthralled. These interdisciplinary essays engage with flowers as real, artificial, and represented objects across the Tudor and Stuart courts in gardens, literature, painting, interior furnishing, garments, and as jewels, medicine, and food. Situating this burgeoning floral culture within a European floral revolution of science, natural history, global trade, and colonial expansion, they reveal the court's distinctive floral identity and history. If the rose operated as a particularly English lingua franca of royal power across two dynasties, this volume sheds light on an array of wild and garden flowers to offer an immersive picture of how the Tudor and Stuart courts lived and functioned, styled and displayed themselves through flowers. It contributes to a revival of interest in the early modern green world and provides a focused view of a court and court culture that used and revelled in blooms. • interdisciplinary—this collection incorporates interdisciplinary perspectives and methods, taking a broad view of flowers' role in material, visual and literary culture, thereby forging a 'world view' of flowers at the English court and appealing to a range of scholars • social and cultural relevance—the collection addresses the natural world and people's relationships with it, topics foregrounded in modern social and cultural debates, as well as intersecting with other areas of continued relevance and interest such as soft power, consumer culture, gender, and globalisation. • groundbreaking—first publication to directly address flowers within court culture. In doing so it unites traditional topics of interest such as art and architecture with newer areas of interest that focus on transient items such as medical preparations and scent.
Contents
Acknowledgements, Table of Illustrations, Introduction: Flowers and the Courts. - Susannah Lyon-Whaley, Flowering Spaces, 1. The 'greater delight': Gardens, Plants, and Flowers and the Tudor and Early Stuart Court. - Paula Henderson, 2. Canopied with Flowers: Adorning Court Spaces with Floral Tapestries and Hangings. - Eleri Lynn, 3. 'I have them in my garden growing': Henry Dingley's Life with Flowers in Sixteenth-Century Worcestershire. - Maria Hayward, Flowers and the Body, 1. Flowers and Dress: Decorative, Dynastic, and Symbolic. - Susan North, 2. Blooming Fertility: Henrietta Maria and the Power of Plants as Iconography and Physic. - Erin Griffey, 3. A Taste for Flowers: Regenerating the Restoration Table. - Susannah Lyon-Whaley, Performing Flowers, 1. 'Fairy Bowers' and 'Precious Flowers' in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Elizabethan Court Culture. - Bonnie Lander Johnson, 2. Flowers and Gift Culture at the Elizabethan Court. - Susan M. Cogan, 3. Painted Flowers in Later Seventeenth-Century English Portraits. - Diana Dethloff, Global Flowers, 1. English Knots and French Parterres: English Floriculture in Continental Context. - Elizabeth Hyde, 2. The Orange and the Rose: Horticultural and Decorative Flowers at the English and Dutch Courts of William III and Mary II. - Amy Lim and Renske Ek, 3. Floral Culture in a New Imperial Era: Indian Textiles in English Courts and Commons c. 1560-1700. - Beverly Lemire, Index.
