Аннотация:This essay surveys the early modern representation and practice of inscribing words on trees in pastoral and other imaginative literary works as well as the more unexpected genres of practical gardening manuals, historiography, and travel narratives printed in early modern England. The range of genres suggests the unexpected cultural resonance of an otherwise apparently negligible literary form, the tree carving. When considered in relation to recent scholarship on inscriptive writing in the period, such carving suggests not a paradisiacal ideal but scenes of interpersonal violence, failures to communicate, and the dangerous self‐doubts about intersection of culture and nature. (L. K.)
