ABSTRACT
Well before the sixteenth century, plants in England had long held a diverse array of functions in households crossing the bounds of social rank; books, on the other hand, had not. In her study of the economic history of the English book trade, Marjorie Plant notes that “in the sixteenth century the buying of a book was something of an event in a man’s life, calling for as much forethought as the buying of a piece of furniture for his house” (206), and Sears Jayne has argued that “outside the Universities very few people in England before 1590 owned as many as fifteen different books” (14). Moreover, and especially in the early part of the century, participation in book culture could be attended by very real personal risks.1 As the century progressed, however, and print became more prevalent, books increasingly did find their way into homes as part of the process of what Roger Chartier has characterized as “typographical acculturation” (159). Peter Clark’s study of almost 3,000 household inventories shows that book-owning rose fourfold in three Kentish towns between 1560 and 1640. Books clearly and increasingly crossed the domestic threshold-but then where were they put? Where were they used? Although books may have been more and more present in the homes of individual owners, books lacked an entrenched and meaningful place there: that is, they lacked both a physical site devoted to their storage, display, and use and a social status that underwrote their occupation of that site. This was especially true of printed, vernacular, secular works, and more especially of the miscellaneous kind so often characterized as gardens of verse. Of course, their makers (both authors and printers) could only hope they would gain such a place, so that buyers would not hesitate at the bookstall to buy them and to bring them home.
