Enfilade

Coming this fall from Lund Humphries:

Andrea Pappas, Embroidering the Landscape: Women, Art, and the Environment in British North America, 1740–1770 (London: Lund Humphries, 2023), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1848226241, £50 / $90.

Linking histories of women, relationships to the natural environment, material culture and art, Andrea Pappas presents a new, multi-dimensional view of eighteenth-century American culture from a unique perspective. This book investigates how and why women pictured the landscape in their needlework. It explores the ways their embroidered landscapes address the tumultuous environmental history of the period; how their depictions of nature differ from those made by men; and what women’s choices of motifs can tell us about their lives and their relationships to nature. Embroidering the Landscape situates these pastoral and georgic needleworks (c. 1740–1775) at the intersection of environmental and social histories, interpreting them through ecocritical and social lenses. Pappas’ investigation draws out connections between women’s depicted landscapes and environmental and cultural history at a time when nature itself was a charged arena for changes in agriculture, husbandry, gardening, and the emerging discourses of botany and natural history. Her insights change our understanding of the relationship between culture and the environment in this period and raise new questions about the unrecognized extent of women’s engagement with nature and natural science.

Andrea Pappas is Associate Professor at Santa Clara University. She has published on topics ranging from the Renaissance to the present and is particularly interested in the work of people on the margins or in overlooked artifacts.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction: Surveying the Field
1  The Eye of the Needle
2  Roots and Terroir
3  Greener Pastures
4  Flock, Fish, and Fowl
5  Women’s Estate
6  Women and ‘Experiential Botany’
Conclusion: Women’s Harvest

Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Index

Distributed by Yale UP:

Finola O’Kane, Landscape Design & Revolution in Ireland and the United States, 1688–1815 (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2023), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-1913107383, £45 / $65.

Explores how revolutionary ideas were translated into landscape design, encompassing liberty, equality, improvement and colonialism.

Spanning the designed landscapes of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution of 1776, and the Irish rebellion of 1798, with some detours into revolutionary France, this book traces a comparative history of property structures and landscape design across the eighteenth-century Atlantic world and evolving concepts of plantation and improvement within imperial ideology. Revolutionaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, George Washington, Arthur Young, Lord Edward FitzGerald, and Pierce Butler constructed houses, farms, and landscape gardens—many of which have since been forgotten or selectively overlooked. How did the new republics and revolutionaries, having overthrown social hierarchies, translate their principles into spatial form? As the eighteenth-century ideology of improvement was applied to a variety of transatlantic and enslaved environments, new landscape designs were created—stretching from the suburbs of Dublin to the sea islands of the state of Georgia. Yet these revolutionary ideas of equality and freedom often contradicted reality, particularly where the traditional design of the great landed estate—the building block of aristocratic power throughout Europe—intersected with that of the farm and the plantation.

Finola O’Kane is a landscape historian, architect, and professor at the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy, University College Dublin.