Embroidering the Landscape - (Northern Lights) by Andrea Pappas (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Linking histories of women, relationships to the natural environment, material culture and art, Andrea Pappas presents a new, multi-dimensional view of eighteenth-century American culture from a unique perspective. This book investigates how and why women pictured the landscape in their needlework. It explores the ways their embroidered landscapes address the tumultuous environmental history of the period; how their depictions of nature differ from those made by men; and what women's choices of motifs can tell us about their lives and their relationships to nature.

Embroidering the Landscape situates these pastoral and georgic needleworks (c. 1740-1775) at the intersection of environmental and social histories, interpreting them through ecocritical and social lenses. Pappas' investigation draws out connections between women's depicted landscapes and environmental and cultural history at a time when nature itself was a charged arena for changes in agriculture, husbandry, gardening, and the emerging discourses of botany and natural history. Her insights change our understanding of the relationship between culture and the environment in this period and raise new questions about the unrecognized extent of women's engagement with nature and natural science.

Review Quotes

Winner of the Historians of British Art Book Prize 2025 for a single-authored book with a subject between 1600-1800

'Andrea Pappas's Embroidering the Landscape is a work of serious intellectual ambition. Not content to foreground embroidered needlework as subject of intensive art-historical inquiry, Pappas excavates women's contributions to an expanded vision of pictorial art. Written with lucid, critical acuity, Embroidering the Landscape troubles received views in which embroidered landscapes embody "naïve" visions. Instead, the book demonstrates how these understudied works were made by worldly women actively combining representational systems and spatial projections encountered in European precedents, Asian export ware, and first-hand experience. Working up from the archive to theorize scalar hierarchies and the "telescopic perspective" incorporated into embroidered pictorial logics, Pappas places needleworks and their makers in an Atlantic world of imperial inequality, land spoliation, and colonialism's devastating ecological consequences. Embroidering the Landscape is a timely contribution that will find readership in environmental history, women's studies, and histories of science, among other fields.'

Winner, 2024 Charles F. Montgomery Award from the Decorative Arts Society.

'Andrea Pappas's Embroidering the Landscape is a work of serious intellectual ambition ... [it] is a timely contribution that will find readership in environmental history, women's studies, and histories of science, among other fields.'

'Andrea Pappas's timely examination of pictorial needlework refreshingly reframes colonial American women as skilled agents of improvement who engaged needle and thread to document and imagine the natural worlds they knew intimately. Stitched sheep, pears, fish, and fields come alive in this detailed environmental and material culture analysis. This is essential reading for any scholar of colonial America.' - Catharine Dann Roeber

'By isolating the contingent details found within these embroidered landscapes, Pappas foregrounds the economic, geographical, and horticultural knowledge possessed by the women who produced them... Overarchingly, Embroidering the Landscape: Women, Art and the Environment in British North America, 1740-1770 is an important contribution to the study of visual culture as well as the complex ecosystem of British North America with its dependence upon a global economy for its very survival. This much-needed study will complement the fields of American art, decorative arts, environmental history, and women's studies.' - Nancy Siegel, CAA Reviews

'Pappas has, like the New England women and their embroidered landscapes she studies, fashioned a colorful, intricate, and well-crafted (in every sense of the word) volume that reminds us of our physical and figurative connections to the natural world, not to mention the various means through which we might continue to represent such associations. This is a master class in material cultural analysis, which further demonstrates why scholars must look beyond "traditional" sources in weaving together our frayed but vibrant past.' - Vaughn Scribner, H-Net Reviews: H-Environment

About the Author

Andrea Pappas is Professor of Art History at Santa Clara University. She has published on topics ranging from the Renaissance to the present and is particularly interested in the work of people on the margins or in overlooked artefacts.