THE ENCHANTED GARDEN In Renaissance England with Luke Morgan

This lecture focuses on key examples of landscape design in Elizabeth and Jacobean England.  It will compare actual gardens with literary ones such as Spenser’s ‘Bower of Bliss’  in The Faerie Queene and Prospero’s island in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In English Renaissance literature, gardens are often depicted as seductive lairs of fatal enchantresses.  This lecture will explore the possibility that similar ideas informed the responses of visitors to actual gardens of the period.

DR LUKE MORGAN is a Senior Lecturer in Art History & Theory at Monash University.  His books include Nature as Model: Design(2007) and The Monster in the Garden: The Grotesque  and the Gigantic in Renaissance Landscape Design (2015), both published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.  His current research on English Renaissance gardens is funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant.

The Elizabethan Garden, newly recreated by English Heritage, at Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire