The Feminine Monarchie or THE HISTORY OF BEES

Charles Butler

1623

The Feminine Monarchie is an early and remarkable work of English natural

history, first published in 1609, and written by a scholarly country parson of

wide ranging interests. Like the later Gilbert White of Selborne, a distant relation,

Charles Butler had a deep curiosity about the natural world and recorded his

discoveries methodically, in keeping with the growing scientific mood of the

seventeenth century.

Butler was the author of several books on subjects as diverse as music,

grammar, logic, and church law. He was also a noted beekeeper and The

Feminine Monarchie is the classic English beekeeping text, earning Butler the

title ‘father of English bee-keeping’. The book explores the world of the honey

bee with a keen intelligence, and makes implicit reference to Elizabeth I’s long

reign as England’s female monarch.

This is the first new edition of The Feminine Monarchie to be published

for over three hundred years, and contains a new introduction, as well as

annotations and a glossary of the more obscure words used by Butler. The

spelling and grammar have been modernised throughout. This edition has been

prepared from the 1623 edition, which includes Butler’s famous ‘Bees Madrigal’.

John Owen is vicar of two rural parishes in Hampshire, in the South Downs

National Park, thirty miles from Butler’s parish of Wootton St Lawrence in the

same county. He keeps bees, poultry and goats and is rural advisor in the

Diocese of Portsmouth.