John Evelyn's Experimental Garden

Nature, Spirit, Cosmos
1. Auflage 2027
ISBN: 978-1-032-98116-1
Verlag: Taylor & Francis

Buch, Englisch, 230 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Reihe: Routledge Research in Landscape and Environmental Design

This book concerns three gardens by John Evelyn, interpretated in terms the understanding of Nature and experiment he held in the middle years of the seventeenth century, the time of their creation. Two of the gardens are detailed in his great unfinished work, Elysium Britannicum; or the Royal Gardens. The third is the garden he planted at his home in Sayes Court c. 1653.

As a Royalist living in enforced retirement under the Commonwealth, Evelyn had time to write, garden, and grapple with the rich cultures of experiment and gardening he had first encountered in his youthful tours of Italy and France. These European ideas coupled with his dawning interest in Francis Bacon’s reformist programme prepared the ground for Evelyn’s Elysium Britannicum. A monument to late Humanist culture, the Elysium describes the ideal Royal Garden in all its aspects whilst also detailing Evelyn’s speculative physics, and describing a range of curious hortulan experimental episodes designed for inclusion within its bounds - experiments in hydraulics, alchemy, optics, and curious harmonic cures. Evelyn’s gardens emerge as latent laboratories.

The book will be of interest to garden historians, and historians of Early Modern science and ideas, and those interested in the spatial expression of scientific culture.

Zielgruppe

Academic, Postgraduate, and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Odgers, Juliet

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Garten- und Landschaftsarchitektur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction Chapter 1. The Elysium Britannicum as Solomon's Garden: The Influence of Francis Bacon Chapter 2. Redemptive Labours: Eden and Chymistry in the Philosophico-Medicall Garden Chapter 3. The Philosophico-Medicall Garden as an Emblem of the Philosophers’ Stone Chapter 4. The Spectacle of the Royal Garden: Perspective and Optical Experiment Chapter 5. The Enchanted Garden: Experimental Acoustics and Harmonic Cures Chapter 6. The Dial Garden at Sayes Court: A Theatre of the Sun and Moon 7. Bibliography

Über Autor(innen)

Juliet Odgers is an architect who practiced in London for some years before taking up a post teaching design at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University in the late 1990s. Following this appointment, she studied for a PhD at the University of Bath and now pursues and academic career at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University. Her publications on John Evelyn include contributions to Perspective as Practice: Renaissance Cultures of Optics ed. by Sven Dupre (Brepols, 2019) and Jacques Gaffarel: Between Magic and Science, ed. by Hiro Hirai (Serra, 2014) and Economy and Architecture (Routledge, 2015). She co-edits the academic journal arq: Architectural Research Quarterly and is currently working on an edited book, Questioning Architecture’s Disciplinary Cultures, for publication by Routledge.