ABSTRACT
Most early modern English love poetry is based upon a male speaker/(poet) describing a female love object. The focus of the description is the woman's body as site of erotic pleasure. Within the English tradition, poetic blazon typically consisted of a catalogue listing each of these particular beauties, their sum constituting an exquisite, if none the less troubling, totality; their rhetoric inscribing them in a Petrarchan world of "ideal types, beautiful monsters composed of every individual perfection". This chapter considers a blazon of a woman's body that is part of a woman-authored poem, "Nature's Landskip" by Margaret Cavendish: This blazon is similar to Spenser's as it uses fruits and flowers to describe a female body. Andrew Marvell's "Upon Appleton House" resurrects not only the institution of the Roman Catholic convent, but the contested public/private space(s) of that "familial" institution and considers them in terms of how the secular aristocratic family of the Reformation was to be reconstructed against Catholic norms.
