Garten der Musen und Grazien

This study is essentially a thorough discussion of the idea of the garden in humanist, and especially neo-stoic, thought in the Netherlands in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, based on a detailed examination of a number of key contributions to the theme. The focus in the first part of the book is on a meticulous explication of this theme in dialogues by Erasmus and Lipsius, with particular emphasis on the classical sources of their thought. Seneca appears to have been particularly important to both for the way in which they used the garden to express the stoic ideal of the good life. Lipsius’ contribution, based on the concepts of otium philosophicum and modesta voluptas, seems to have been particularly influential. For him, the humanist garden was a place where the philosopher could escape from the cares of everyday life to think, read and write in peace, while enjoying the pleasures it offered within measure. After establishing the place of the garden in humanist thought, Lauterbach follows this complex of ideas and associations through to the neo-Latin and vernacular writers of the Dutch Republic in the first half of the seventeenth century, with particular attention to Jacob Cats and Constantijn Huygens. She argues that, while for Lipsius the garden had represented a refuge from the troubled times in which he lived, for these Dutch writers this version of neo-stoicism offered a means of dealing with the ethical problems arising out of prosperity. Also, she sees religious considerations as playing a more prominent part in the thought of these later writers than they seem to have done for Lipsius at least. The second part of the book is a more systematic analysis of the main concepts introduced in the first part, and involves more than a little repetition, especially with regard to classical sources of neo-stoicism. Although at its heart this study is a painstaking explication of the chosen texts, their sources, and their implications, Lauterbach also attempts to relate these intellectual developments to the social and political circumstances of the period. The contrast between garden and town, and the system of ethics related to this contrast, are presented as satisfying the ideological needs of the rising urban elites of the Netherlands. For most of Europe this way of looking at the garden came to an end with the rise of absolutism which, it is argued, transformed the genre in praise of rural life into a straightforward criticism of the corruption of the Court. In contrast, the idea of the humanist garden could continue to flourish in the very different circumstances of the Dutch Republic, as it provided an ethical justification of the newly enhanced status of its powerful urban oligarchies. This aspect of the study is somewhat perfunctory and not entirely convincing. The rather glib generalisations about the needs of the elites in the towns of the Netherlands beg rather too many questions, and in particular assume a clearer divide between an ill-defined élite and the rest of the upper bourgeoisie than was probably the case. Lauterbach is more convincing when she returns to attitudes to the garden, and argues that the humanist discourse on the garden provides important insights into the understanding of nature in the Renaissance. The garden was seen as a place where man and nature could work together in harmony, and where individuals could become truer to themselves by working with the laws of nature. Lauterbach argues that the shift to the idea of the garden as a taming of nature only came later with what she calls the absolutist garden of the baroque. The end for the neo-stoic idea of the garden finally came in the later seventeenth century, as a result, in this interpretation at least, of the advance of scientific ideas and thus of a new way of thinking about man's relationship to nature

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