Christine Coch

The architecture of moral trial in the early modern garden

This paper reconstructs the experience of visiting Diana's Grove at Lord Lumley's Nonsuch, a celebrated sixteenth-century pleasure garden, to show how the period's real gardens prepared readers to engage the didactic architecture of textual gardens like Spenser's Bower of Bliss. By integrating evidence from firsthand domestic accounts of the Grove and foreign travelers' diaries, I illustrate how the Grove conditioned its visitors to participate in the shifting triangulation of reader, knight, and garden/woman built into Spenser's canto.

Despite their obvious disparities, Lumley's Grove and Spenser's Bower employ a strikingly similar structural scheme. In each we find a sensual, forbidden woman enclosed in a garden setting and a male voyeur who must decide how to respond to her charms. Both are described in verse that ponders the dangers of following the senses' urgings even as it appeals to the senses through poetic language. Like the Bower's, the Grove's allegorical landscape required visitors to interact with a series of tableaux enacting a sequence of aesthetic and moral tests.

The didactic force of Spenser's canto hinged on his readers' willingness to measure their own reactions to the Bower's tests against those of the Knight of Temperance. In Diana's Grove, less was left to chance: verse inscriptions and physical layout impelled visitors to think critically about their responses to the challenges posed by the garden's art by comparing their reactions to those of a prototypic viewer (in this case Actaeon, an obviously negative prototype). The resulting triangulation blurred the bounds between observer and observed, art and life, engaging the reader physically, as a sensible body in relation to sculpture, buildings, plantings, and other bodies, and also intellectually, as a mind compelled to interpret the significance of the body's position.

For those of Spenser's readers familiar with the architecture of this sort of immersive, self-conscious contemporary pleasure garden, the setting of Guyon's test would have lent his text a charge not easily recaptured today: a formal injunction to choose a position and experience its moral consequences.