Chapter 1 - Trees, Kings, Christ

Summary

This chapter reads Richard II’s garden scene in the context of early modern debates about sacramentalism and the created world. The garden scene reveals its awareness of these debates and the ways in which they occurred in genres both high (learned tracts, printed books) and low (oral cultures, cheap print). The gardener demonstrates his political and theological sophistication through his hands-on knowledge of gardening. In the same way, ordinary people off-stage participated in their culture’s most urgent controversies through popular genre that were frequently dismissed by their social betters.