Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain's Renaissance to America's New World - Hardcover

Olwig, Kenneth Robert; Peterson, Franklynn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0299174204 ISBN 13: 9780299174200

Verlag: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic explores the origins and lasting influences of two contesting but intertwined discourses that persist today when we use the words landscape, country, scenery, nature, national. In the first sense, the land is a physical and bounded body of terrain upon which the nation state is constructed (e.g., the purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain, from sea to shining sea). In the second, the country is constituted through its people and established through time and precedence (e.g., land where our fathers died, land of the Pilgrims' pride). Kenneth Olwig's extended exploration of these discourses is a masterful work of scholarship both broad and deep, which opens up new avenues of thinking in the areas of geography, literature, theater, history, political science, law, and environmental studies. Olwig tracks these ideas though Anglo-American history, starting with seventeenth-century conflicts between the Stuart kings and the English Parliament, and the Stuart dream of uniting Scotland with England and Wales into one nation on the island of Britain. He uses a royal production of a Ben Jonson masque, with stage sets by architect Inigo Jones, as a touchstone for exploring how the notion of ""landscape"" expands from artful stage scenery to a geopolitical ideal. Olwig pursues these contested concepts of the body politic from Europe to America and to global politics, illuminating a host of topics, from national parks and environmental planning to theories of polity and virulent nationalistic movements.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kenneth Olwig is professor of geography at the University of Trondheim in Norway and the author of Nature's Ideological Landscape.

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Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic

FROM BRITAIN'S RENAISSANCE TO AMERICA'S NEW WORLDBy Kenneth Robert Olwig

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

Copyright © 2002 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-299-17420-0

Contents

Illustrations...........................................................................................viiForeword................................................................................................xiAcknowledgments.........................................................................................xxiIntroduction: Nature, Country, and Landscape............................................................xxiii1. The Political Landscape as Polity and Place..........................................................32. Country and Landscape................................................................................433. "Masquing" the Body Politic of Britain...............................................................624. Landscaping the Body Politic of the British State....................................................805. Landscaping Britain's Country and Nature.............................................................996. Gendering the Nation's Natural Landscape.............................................................1257. Landscaping Racial and National Progress.............................................................1488. The "Country" of the United States contra the "Landscape" of America's New World.....................176Conclusion: Landscape, Place, and the Body Politic......................................................213Notes...................................................................................................231Bibliography............................................................................................261Index...................................................................................................289

Chapter One

The Political Landscape as Polity and Place

First, for the Scene was drawn a Landtachaap ... Ben Jonson, the Masque of Blackness, 1605

Landscape made its dramatic entrance onto the English stage, and into influential realms of Modern English discourse, through the vehicle of a fabulously expensive and prestigious court masque, The Masque of Blackness, written by Ben Jonson and staged by Inigo Jones. The masque was called "The Queen's Masque" because it was James I's queen, Anne of Denmark, who conceived the idea for the masque and arranged to have it produced with herself in a leading role. She took over the services of Inigo Jones from her renowned brother, King Christian IV of Denmark, and had Jones do the stage design and scenography. She made Ben Jonson her protg at court when she asked him to do the text (Jonson 1969, 48). This international mix suggests that the renewed interest in the concept of landscape at this juncture in English history must be seen in the light of ongoing discourses and practices within Europe more generally.

The Renaissance was a cosmopolitan era, and the English court was a cosmopolitan place. Anne had lived in Denmark, Mecklenburg, and Scotland; Jones had explored Italy and worked for a Danish King; and Jonson had been in the Netherlands. This was an era before nationalism had narrowed the language and minds of Europeans. To understand the developing meaning of landscape, it is thus wise to look at the larger international Renaissance context within which English discourse on landscape and country took place. Discourses reflect an era, but they are the product of concrete individuals expressing themselves within the personal contexts of their lives. For this reason, this chapter traces the steps of Queen Anne and King James back to Anne's Danish home, where they began what became an often tempestuous marriage, augured by storm.

Retracing the trail of the royal couple's progress provides a narrative means to uncover clues to the continental background of the word Landtschap, before it turns up in the introductory scene of the British Masque of Blackness. The point of this tale is to facilitate the understanding of the differing meanings of landscape, nature, and country. The tale of James's Danish connection helps reveal how differing meanings of these concepts were linked in a context that informed the lives of people who were to play lead roles in the English court's "invention" of Britain.

KING JAMES'S TEMPESTUOUS DANISH CONNECTION

James VI of Scotland was opposed on principle to allowing his queen "to meddle with the Politick gouvernemente of the commonn-weale" (James I [1599] 1969, 98). Anne, however, would have learned from her own shrewd mother, the Danish Queen Sophie of Mecklenburg, that much of the power at court lay in the manipulation of the symbolic face which it presented to the body politic (Bech 1963, 510-21). Anne literally cast herself in the role of "the glorious patroness of this mighty Monarchy." If James lent his support to his wife's theatrical interests it might have been because the reclusive king understood what the role of the masque could be in furthering his political goals (Parry 1981; Goldberg 1983; Marcus 1986, 25-26).

With the notable exception of a female biographer (Williams 1970), historians of Britain have largely disparaged or ignored Queen Anne of Denmark. Her relationship with James was tempestuous, and historians have a tendency to side with the native British monarch-even though Anne's marriage to a man who is reputed to have been a neurotic and a misogynist can hardly have been easy. "Alas! James had married a stupid wife," one of James's biographers gallantly exclaims (Willson 1956, 95). "Her love for gaiety and dancing, for games, masques and pageants," we are told, "was childish rather than courtly. The [Scottish] ministers quickly condemned her 'want of godly and virtuous exercise among her maids', her absence from the Kirk, her 'night-waking and balling'" (Willson 1956, 94; see also Akrigg 1962, 21-22). Modern custodians of British heritage similarly feel obliged to inform visitors to the Queen's House in Greenwich that Anne was "extravagant and pleasure-loving," even though the building she commissioned Jones to design and build was revolutionary in its time as a model of classical restraint (National Maritime Museum n.d., 4). The historian George Macaulay Trevelyan, author of the classic England Under the Stuarts, snubs Anne, not even bothering to have her indexed (Trevelyan [1904] 1960). This dim view of the queen, and the women of the court with her, gives grounds for one modern authority on the Stuart court to warn: "In considering the Jacobean Court culture, it would be unwise to underestimate the intelligence of the female participants" (Parry 1981, 49). As both a woman and a foreigner, Anne was at a double disadvantage. A nineteenth-century historian of British pomp and circumstance thus notes, condescendingly, how he imagines Anne must have reacted to the presentation of an entertainment created by Ben Jonson at the time of her procession from Scotland to London in 1603 to become queen: "It is easy, or rather, it is not easy, to conceive the surprise and delight with which Queen Anne, who had a natural taste for these elegant and splendid exhibitions, must have witnessed the present; she who in Denmark had seen perhaps no Royal amusement but drinking-bouts ..."...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Wisconsin Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0299174204
• ISBN 13: 9780299174200
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 332
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland