Seeds of Sacrifice: Amaranth, The Gardens of Tenochtitlan, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene

This chapter presents the traditional Eurocentric template: rather than view the New World through the eyes of Greco-Roman culture, it views Spenser's Faerie Land through the cultural template of Mexica society. The people of Tenochtitlan understood the medicinal and nutritional value of their plants in ways that European herbalists were striving to document: they had botanical libraries, and a complex system of morphology that predated the comparable Linnaean classification system in Europe by at least 200 years. In the very “middest of Paradise,” Spenser's Garden of Adonis alludes to the Ovidian transformation of unfulfilled lovers into the flowers “Narcisse,” “Hyacinthus,” and “Amaranthus.” Spenser's Faerie Queene represents what the Renaissance gardens of Europe were physically: sites of transatlantic acculturation where peripheral knowledge and material from Mesoamerica invigorates local London with a new mythic register of the natural world from the Americas, creating a garden space where the New World cross-breeds with the Old.