Cultivating collections: Print, plants, and poetics in early modern England (1550--1600)

This thesis argues that book culture and botanical culture intersected in historically-specific ways in later sixteenth-century England; the intersections investigated here range from the linguistic to the conceptual and the material. Developments in horticulture and herbalism (academic, recreational, and practical) meshed with literary developments (especially the increased prominence of print and the value placed on anthologies). In Chapter One, I contend that the titular metaphor of the "garden of verse," so prevalent in printed anthologies of the period, reflects these intersections, especially in light of the broader culture of collection to which plants and writing belonged. Chapters Two through Four elaborate the connections made between forms of botanical writing and a broader rhetorical culture that valued textual compilation at least as much as original authorship; these chapters also highlight the significance in early modern botany of naming, the formation of the most basic relation between words and plants. Specifically, Chapter Two demonstrates how the sixteenth-century European botanical renaissance was manifest in and dependent on developments in a bookish culture, in the form of printed herbals, manuscript herbaria, and correspondence. Chapter Three treats the herbal publications of William Turner as evidence of the appearance of this same bookish botany in England; Turner's commitment to church reform is read as a defining force in his herbal writing practices. Chapter Four shows how the garden catalogues and herbal of John Gerard embody the literary culture of the day, especially in his ambiguous relation to these texts, falling between simplistic categories of author and anthologist. Chapter Five argues that the metaphor of the "garden of verse" may be read as an expression of the changing domestic status of books in relation to the established household place of plants. I conclude by suggesting that Foucault's episteme of resemblance may be extended, in the case of plants and texts, to an episteme of material interpenetration: one material was knowable in terms of the other, because one was so often and so thoroughly embedded in the other. My research illuminates a complex interplay in the early modern period between materials and discourses rarely considered in tandem today.