Author |
Knight, Leah |
Year |
2009 |
Publisher |
Aldershot: Ashagte |
Number of pages |
163 |
ISBN |
9780754665861 |
Keywords |
|
Abstract
Amazon (2013):
Contemplating the textual gardens, poetic garlands, and epigrammatic groves which
dot the landscape of early modern English print, Leah Knight exposes and analyzes
the close configuration of plants and writing in the period. She argues that the early
modern cultures and cultivation of plants and books depended on each other in historically
specific and novel ways that yielded a profusion of linguistic, conceptual, metaphorical,
and material intersections.Examining both poetic and botanical texts, as well as the
poetics of botanical texts, this study focuses on the two outstanding English botanical
writers of the sixteenth century, William Turner and John Gerard, to suggest the unexpected
historical relationship between literature and science in the early modern genre of
the herbal. In-depth readings of their work are situated amid chapters that establish
the broader context for the interpenetration of plants and writing in the period's
cultural practices in order to illuminate a complex interplay between materials and
discourses rarely considered in tandem today.