Chapter 7 - Useful Books

Summary

This chapter addresses early modern England’s ‘useful’ genres of plant writing – printed herbals and gardening manuals. As they developed in printed formats across the sixteenth century, received by enthusiastic users and consumers, both genres of plant literature promised to improve the lives of their readers, bringing them pleasure and profit and guiding them in the cultivation, identification, appreciation, and therapeutic application of vegetable beings. This chapter explores more deeply exactly what it meant for these works to be ‘useful’, and the various uses to which they were put, through a consideration of their bibliographic and literary form, extant evidence of readerly engagement, and their long-reaching effects when it came to cultural and scientific authority and the development of botany as a colonial science.