Interlacing in his work practical, literary, and philosophical approaches to landscape architecture, Evelyn created the first large-scale encyclopedic work on the science and art of gardening."--BOOK JACKET.

John Evelyn (1620-1706) was a pivotal figure in 17th-century intellectual life in England. The contributors approach him and his work from diverse disciplines: architectural and intellectual history and histories of science, agriculture, gardens, and literature. They present the "Elysium Britannicum" as a central document of late European humanism.

The writing of science in the period 1580-1700 is artfully, diffidently, carelessly, boldly, and above all self-consciously literary. The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century English Literature considers the literary textures of science writing — its rhetorical figures, neologisms, its uses of parody, romance, and various kinds of verse. The experimental and social practices of science are examined through literary representations of the laboratory, of collaborative retirement, of virtual, epistolary conversation, and of an imagined paradise of investigative fellowship and learning. Claire Preston argues that the rhetorical, generic, and formal qualities of scientific writing are also the intellectual processes of early-modern science itself. How was science to be written in this period? That question, which piqued natural philosophers who were searching for apt conventions of scientific language and report, was initially resolved by the humanist rhetorical and generic skills in which they were already highly trained. At the same time non-scientific writers, enthralled by the developments of science, were quick to deploy ideas and images from astronomy, optics, chemistry, biology, and medical practices. Practising scientists and inspired laymen or quasi-scientists produced new, adjusted, or hybrid literary forms, often collapsing the distinction between the factual and the imaginative, between the rhetorically ornate and the plain. Early-modern science and its literary vehicles are frequently indistinguishable, scientific practice and scientific expression mutually involved. Among the major writers discussed are Montaigne, Bacon, Donne, Browne, Lovelace, Boyle, Sprat, Oldenburg, Evelyn, Cowley, and Dryden.

Scholars from ancient and early modern studies, art history, literary criticism, philosophy, and the history of science explore the interplay between nature, science, and art in influential ancient texts and their reception in the Renaissance.

In an eloquent history of landscape and land use, Vittoria Di Palma takes on the “anti-picturesque”—how landscapes that elicit fear and disgust have shaped our conceptions of beauty and the sublime.

From literature to landscape architecture, an expansive, contemplative exploration of the significance of place. For ancient Romans, genius loci was literally “the genius of the place,” the presiding divinity who inhabited a site and gave it meaning. While we are less attuned to divinity today, we still sense that a place has significance. In this book, eminent garden historian John Dixon Hunt explores genius loci in many settings, including contemporary land art, the paintings of Paul and John Nash, travel writers such as Henry James, Paul Theroux, and Lawrence Durrell on Provence, Mexico, and Cyprus, and landscape architects who invent new meanings for a site. This book is a nuanced, thoughtful exploration of how places become more significant to us through the myriad ways we see, talk about, and remember them.

The Oxford History of Classical Reception (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have stimulated responses and refashioning by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the five volumes. OHCREL endeavours to interrogate, rather than inertly reiterate, conventional assumptions about literary 'periods', the processes of canon-formation, and the relations between literary and non-literary discourse. It conceives of 'reception' as a complex process of dialogic exchange and, rather than offering large cultural generalizations, it engages in close critical analysis of literary texts. It explores in detail the ways in which English writers' engagement with classical literature casts as much light on the classical originals as it does on the English writers' own cultural context. This second volume, and third to appear in the series, covers the years 1558-1660, and explores the reception of the ancient genres and authors in English Renaissance literature, engaging with the major, and many of the minor, writers of the period, including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, and Jonson. Separate chapters examine the Renaissance institutions and contexts which shape the reception of antiquity, and an annotated bibliography provides substantial material for further reading.