Harvey Miller Early Modern Gardens and Landscapes

This series invites original scholarship that captures the multiplicity of cultural responses to and appropriations of nature across the globe from the mid-fourteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. We are particularly interested in exploring the intersections between garden traditions, landscape imagination, and environmental knowledge of the early modern period, framed by different humanities perspectives with a strong historical emphasis. Subjects can range from spaces that orchestrated European encounters with the natural world on a local or global scale—such as pleasure and botanical gardens, cabinets of curiosity, and artistic collections—to landscapes of labor, spirituality, fantasy, and memory: from the Caribbean plantations and sacred groves of Africa and Japan to the Counter Reformation sacri monti and the Chinese literati painting as a form of meditation. Contributions that highlight transfers or conversations between mainstream and vernacular garden design traditions or put scientific botanical and medical discourse in dialogue with Indigenous knowledge and practices are particularly welcome. No other comparable series intended to capture this range of scholarship exists in English. Closely related in focus are the Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture (University of Pennsylvania Press, discontinued) and Giardini e Paesaggio (Leo S. Olschki).