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Spanning the period from Elizabeth I's reign to Charles II's restoration, this study argues the garden is a primary site evincing a progressive narrative of change, a narrative that looks to the Edenic as obtainable ideal in court politics, economic prosperity and national identity in early modern England. The book offers an original take on gardens by including medical and colonial discourse and by considering the perspective of ecocriticism.

The Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC) has found itself breaking methodological ground in several respects. Dedicated to a collaborative methodology, a largely female subject area, and the goals of open access, EMROC has discovered many challenges and rewards. The collective offers its experiences and vision as a means of transforming future research endeavors in sustainable and exciting ways through cross-campus exchanges and Citizen Humanities initiatives.

This article discusses the early importation of culinary plants into England by the father and son gardener/adventurers, John Tradescant the elder and John Tradescant the younger. These men arguably did more to change the botanical and gastronomic landscape in England in the seventeenth century than anyone else. Traveling to the Low Countries, France, Algiers, Russia, and the New World, the Tradescants spent their lives collecting new plants and then growing and propagating those plants for their own use and for distribution. Bound up with global politics and the building of the British Empire, their activities mark the beginnings of the long era of the movement of edible plants around the planet. The John Tradescants' contribution to the edenizing of the English garden was really extraordinary, broadening the possibilities of taste at the English table.

To consider cake as a field of study or even as a case study seems a bit of a sweet indulgence, given that cake is hardly fundamental to the quotidian needs of good nutrition or a good meal. Rather, as Sir Toby indicates to the puritanical Malvolio, cake is (like ale), something that is part of revelry and celebration-a luxury. Yet, if we consider its history from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries (and beyond), cake provides a narrative of Europe's engagement with global exploration, colonization, and trade; the development of chemistry and technology; and the illusive networks and communities of recipe exchange. Thus, to study cake is to study culture, with its political, economic, technological, and artistic complexities.

Literary criticism often focuses on Perdita's \"rustic garden\" in The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare, but often ignores Hermione's garden despite its clear connection to Leontes' perception of his wife's virtue. As the garden comes to represent Hermione's disputed body, so too in the second half of the play the garden emblematizes Perdita's virginal body.

In the Renaissance, the garden is a defined and enclosed area, dominated by human control but intended to resemble the mythical gardens that require no human intervention or labor. The garden owner performs the divine act of animating the inanimate but artificially, as the statuary mimic's life. By means of the direct manipulation of the garden performance, the owner controls the actions. Paulina similarly controls Leontes and Perdita though her miraculous performance that vivifies an inert statue with human rather than automatized life. Life imitates art in the scene rather than art imitating life. Through the orchestration of this extravagant garden performance in which the corporeal body appears mechanical, Hermione regains Paulina's rightful place as wife and as co-ruler in the political state. Within the structure of Renaissance Italian garden, the giardino segreto, the descendant of the medieval hortus conclusus, was an enclosed area set aside for private use. Perdita's iconographic resemblance to Elizabeth is represented in her flower garden.

Introduction of foreign plants into English gardens represented a physical incorporation of the new world within the soil of the old. New World discovery was predicated on the pursuit of new routes for the spice trade; the slave trade facilitated and sustained the viability of colonialism. Slaves were headed to the Americas from Europe and Africa as a source of cheap labor for colonial mines and plantations. American plants were sent back to Europe and to other destinations where European merchants had trade connections, such as Africa and Asia. The slave trade, used to transport horticulture, supported and sustained the aristocratic and merchant culture of conspicuous consumption. In a Renaissance garden's natural setting outdoors, its aesthetics were structured as a balance between nature and art. Reflecting the garden scenery of flowers, the Ovidian-like male characters, which had been turned into flowers, were to be re-transformed into handsome young men. The botanical garden design reflected a symbolic representation of the world.