Enclosure Polemics and the Garden in the 1650s

Through close readings of husbandry manuals, religious pamphlets, and Paradise Lost, this essay explores how polemicists on both sides of the enclosure debate made strategic use of garden imagery in their writing. The argument shows that Puritan improvers at midcentury, by figuring enclosed commons as idealized gardens and England as a new Eden, invent a distinctly georgic—and distinctly English—vision of paradise. Turning to the appropriation of garden imagery by enclosure opponents, the essay juxtaposes Gerrard Winstanley and John Milton, both of whom privilege the paradise within over any imaginable earthly garden.