Floral Culture and the Tudor and Stuart Courts

At court, flowers coloured, scented, adorned, sustained, nourished, and enthralled. These interdisciplinary essays engage with flowers as real, artificial, and represented objects across the Tudor and Stuart courts in gardens, literature, painting, interior furnishing, garments, and as jewels, medicine, and food. Situating this burgeoning floral culture within a European floral revolution of science, natural history, global trade, and colonial expansion, they reveal the court’s distinctive floral identity and history. If the rose operated as a particularly English lingua franca of royal power across two dynasties, this volume sheds light on an array of wild and garden flowers to offer an immersive picture of how the Tudor and Stuart courts lived and functioned, styled and displayed themselves through flowers. It contributes to a revival of interest in the early modern green world and provides a focused view of a court and court culture that used and revelled in blooms. • interdisciplinary―this collection incorporates interdisciplinary perspectives and methods, taking a broad view of flowers’ role in material, visual and literary culture, thereby forging a ‘world view’ of flowers at the English court and appealing to a range of scholars • social and cultural relevance―the collection addresses the natural world and people’s relationships with it, topics foregrounded in modern social and cultural debates, as well as intersecting with other areas of continued relevance and interest such as soft power, consumer culture, gender, and globalisation. • groundbreaking―first publication to directly address flowers within court culture. In doing so it unites traditional topics of interest such as art and architecture with newer areas of interest that focus on transient items such as medical preparations and scent.

Susannah Lyon-Whaley completed her doctoral thesis in Art History at the University of Auckland on Catherine of Braganza and the culture of nature. She has written articles on Stuart queens and the spa, and has further publications forthcoming on Catherine of Braganza and Mary of Modena.