This volume focuses on selected villas and their gardens in France and Italy from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Interdisciplinary and fundamentally contextualizing in approach, the essays examine the relationship between landscape and court culture and statecraft; villas in their broader territorial setting; landscape and representation; gender and the garden; and the social history of garden construction, among other topics. Providing an overview of the new directions that are currently taken in cultural landscape studies, Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France also places these sites within the context of European intellectual history, material culture studies, and cultural landscape studies.