As much as the nineteenth and early twentieth century gardens and their designs were a product and representation of industrialisation and urbanisation, they were also motors of change. Gardens became an industry in and of themselves. They were both the last resting places of the dead and cultivated plots for surv ival. Gardens were therapeutic environments regarded as civilising, socialising and assimialting institutions, and they were designed and perceived as social landscapes and community playgrounds.

Rich with symbolism, gardens were treated as the subject and the setting for...

Landscape architecture and garden-making have witnessed huge changes during the twentieth-century, and the impact of these will continue to be discussed and interpreted in the twenty-first.

New materials and responses to different social conditions, along with new attitudes to how gardens are perceived and interpreted and above all the relationship of built work to the larger landscape of territory and society - all have challenged long-held practices of garden-making, even while those same traditions continue to be at the centre of both designers and users.

The Enlightenment raised fundamental questions about what it meant to be human in a truly global world. At the heart of debates about nature, culture and history, the garden offered itself as a practical demonstration, a living experiment, and a site of debate and discourse.

The design, planting, experience and representation of contemporary gardens in Europe, China and North America reveal intense contributions to debates on aesthetics, both personal and national politics, and on the shaping of nature.

The history of the garden in the Renaissance, traced from the late fourteenth century in Italy to the death of Andre Le Notre in 1700 in France, is a story both of dynamism and codification. The period saw the emergence of what would become archetypal elements of the formal garden and the fixing of theory and language of the garden arts.

At the same time, newly important sciences, developments in engineering, as well as globalization, historicity, and theories of aesthetics were embraced in the construction of such gardens. The result was the notion of the landscape as something to...

The Middle Ages was a time of great upheaval - the period between the seventh and fourteenth centuries saw great social, political and economic change. The radically distinct cultures of the Christian West, Byzantium, Persian-influenced Islam, and al-Andalus resulted in different responses to the garden arts of antiquity and different attitudes to the natural world and its artful manipulation. Yet these cultures interacted and communicated, trading plants, myths and texts. By the fifteenth century the garden as a cultural phenomenon was immensely sophisticated and a vital element in the...

The history of gardens in antiquity is characterized by a rich mix of cultures interacting throughout Europe, Africa and Asia. This period - from the sixth century BCE to the sixth century CE - was foundational to the later periods of garden history. The emergence of advanced horticultural techniques, sustained regional and international trade routes, and centralized power structures promoted the development of highly sophisticated garden culture in both private and public contexts.

New evidence derived from archaeology and fresh analysis of literary and visual sources revises our...

Between 1800 and 1920, middle-class women in the West fought for education, employment, equitable marriage and custody laws, and the vote. Poor women demanded literacy, labor and child protection laws, food, and shelter. Colonization and migrations compounded gender and class conflicts in contact zones where races and ethnic groups met, often violently. Faced with breath-taking social, global, and technological change, many women valiantly worked with and for one another. Key issues include growing attention to late life, discourses of heterosexuality and homosexuality, the rise of the...

The dramatic changes of the 20th century propelled women into unprecedented circumstances. The entrance of women into public space, particularly through their involvement in the labour market, fundamentally changed meanings of feminine identity across the globe. Massive migration created encounters between women of different ethnicities, beliefs, and allegiances. This displacement produced an exchange of critical ideas and technologies between women across cultures, between women and the state, and between the demands of homemaking and workplaces.

Women were impacted by diverse...

The Enlightenment was a complex and often contradictory moment for women in Europe and its colonies. The period between 1680 and 1800 saw civil liberties established through political and intellectual revolution. At the same time, contemporary thinkers produced justifications for ongoing gender, class, and racial inequalities which had profound effects on women. An age of burgeoning commercial and imperial expansion, the period witnessed the birth of consumer society and the peak of the Atlantic slave trade. Modern liberal feminism grew up in this environment, as did the abolition...

The Renaissance was a period of significant cultural transformation in Europe: women were both agents and objects of this historical process. The period witnessed revolutions in nearly every cultural domain, including the controversies of the Reformation, the rise of nascent capitalism, the influence of Humanism, advances in science and medicine, and shifts in the boundaries between public and private life, all of which profoundly affected women's lives.

A Cultural History of Women in the Renaissance covers the period 1400-1650, giving an overview of how changes in social,...