ABSTRACT
By the early seventeenth century, when Aemilia Lanyer published Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) the garden had become an increasingly gendered space, one in which men and women vied for positions of authority. Not long after Lanyer’s publication, for example, William Lawson’s companion manuals appeared, A New Orchard and Garden and The Countrie Hovsewife’s Garden (1618), which rendered more distinct boundaries than before between gardens for men and gardens for women. Men may have competed for status and economic returns as gardening experts and landholders, as we see in Spenser’s case, but women vied for status that stemmed from the decorative uses they made of land, rather than from land ownership itself. On the one hand, women were increasingly encouraged to plant flower gardens, which mobilized positive associations of women as creative agents; on the other, the land on which women planted their gardens was more often than not the legal property of their husbands, fathers, or brothers, which reinforced notions of women’s dependence on men. As William Lawson assures his housewife with a green thumb, her garden will be the result of her “delight and direction,” but if that housewife is married, which Lawson’s manual presumes she is, the garden she plants would be on her husband’s legal property, not her own. Aemilia Lanyer’s poetry draws on the idea that women might make gardens of their own and represents the garden as an ideal space for women to recoup the actual, material losses they experience when disenfranchised from property and land ownership; at the same time, her text suggests that this recuperation is an imagined ideal more than it is a material reality.
