Mr. Roscoe’s Garden is one of the key components of the Fragrant Liverpool Project, a uniquely international conceptual art project which explores the stories, rites, and exchanges that occur when a flower is cut and placed in the human hand. Exploring the storied history of the Liverpool Botanic Gardens, established by William Roscoe in 1802, this volume discusses everything from its legendary orchid collection to the strange and rare plants that arrived through the city’s ports to the indignity of the Gardens’ closing in the 1980s. No book has ever before explored the Liverpool Botanic Gardens and Jyll Bradley’s painstaking design makes this volume a work of art in itself—perfectly timed to coincide with Gardens’ reopening and the reemergence of the collection at the Chelsea Flower Show for the first time in thirty years.

This book shows how modern Brooklyn’s proud urban identity as an arts-friendly community originated in the mid nineteenth century. Before and after the Civil War, Brooklyn’s elite, many engaged in Atlantic trade, established more than a dozen cultural societies, including the Philharmonic Society, Academy of Music, and Art Association. The associative ethos behind Brooklyn’s fine arts flowering built upon commercial networks that joined commerce, culture, and community. This innovative, carefully researched and documented history employs the concept of parallel Renaissances. It shows influences from Renaissance Italy and Liverpool, then connected to New York through regular packet service like the Black Ball Line that ferried people, ideas, and cargo across the Atlantic. Civil War disrupted Brooklyn’s Renaissance. The city directed energies towards war relief efforts and the women’s Sanitary Fair. The Gilded Age saw Brooklyn’s Renaissance energies diluted by financial and political corruption, planning the Brooklyn Bridge and consolidation with New York City in 1898.

Anglo-Italian cultural connections in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been the subject of numerous studies in recent decades. Within that wider body of literature, there has been a growing emphasis on appreciation of the history and culture of Renaissance Italy, especially in nineteenth-century Britain. In 1954 J.R. Hale's England and the Italian Renaissance was a pioneering account of the subject, followed in 1992 by Hilary Fraser's monograph The Victorians and Renaissance Italy and in 2005 by Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance, edited by John E. Law and Lene Østermark-Johansen. There is, however, an obvious gap in the literature concerning the pivotal figure of William Roscoe (1753-1831), the first English-language biographer of Lorenzo de' Medici and of Pope Leo X. The Life of Lorenzo de' Medici called the Magnificent proved to be so popular as to prompt the claim that Roscoe effectively invented the Italian Renaissance as it has become understood by subsequent generations of readers in the English-speaking world. This collection of ten essays redresses the balance by examining Roscoe as biographer, as a connoisseur of Italian literature and as a collector of Italian works of art.

List of members in each volume.