ABSTRACT
A surprising number of early modern English books are identified in their titles as collections of plants. The English Short Title Catalogue turns up a plethora of printed works depicted as posies, nosegays, gardens, orchards, forests, sylvas, arbours, and bowers. In 1569, for instance, appeared the first of several anonymous editions of A godlie gardeine, out of the which most comfortable herbes may be gathered for the health of the wounded conscience.1 Devotional books like this one frequently deployed botanical metaphors that emphasized their health-giving properties. More secular and more spectacular in its use of the same sort of titular trope is George Gascoigne’s bouquet of 1573,
A similarly microcosmic botanical garden was envisioned in 1577 on the title page of John Bishop’s
Around the same time, Richard Jones printed the more modest Smale handfull of fragrant flowers, selected and gathered out of the louely garden of sacred scriptures, fit for any honorable or woorshipfull gentlewoman to smell vnto (Breton); here the metaphor is conventionally gendered and moralized, but a couple of decades later Jones altered the same metaphor to emphasize the architectural features that
framed contemporary gardens in two more titillating titles: Brittons bowre of delights (Breton) and The arbor of amorous deuises (Breton).
