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In the early modern herbal, Sarah Neville finds a captivating example of how Renaissance print culture shaped scientific authority.
List of contents
Prologue. Milton's trees; Introduction. Authorizing English botany; Part I. A History of Herbals: 1. Authorship, book history, and the effects of artifacts; 2. The stationers' company and constraints on English printing; 3. Salubrious illustration and the economics of English herbals; Part II. Anonymity in the Printed English Herbal: 4. Reframing competition: the curious case of the little Herball; 5. The Grete Herball and evidence in the margins; 6. 'Unpublished virtues of the earth': books of healing on the English renaissance stage; Part III. Authors and the Printed English Herbal: 7. William Turner and the medical book trade; 8. John Norton and the redemption of John Gerard.
About the author
Sarah Neville is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Ohio State University. She is an assistant editor of the New Oxford Shakespeare and an associate co-ordinating editor of the Digital Renaissance Editions.
Summary
Herbals, books describing the characteristics and uses of plants, were extraordinarily popular as a genre in early modern England. Illuminating the herbal's rich material history and its remarkable popularity across the social spectrum, Sarah Neville reveals the close relationship between print culture and the construction of scientific authority.
Additional text
'Sarah Neville's fascinating account of how stationers contributed to the creation of botanical texts brings English herbals and the early modern book trade together for the first time. Her reframing of their history irrevocably alters our sense of their importance for the publishers who commissioned them, the printers who manufactured them, and the booksellers who retailed herbals as well as for the Renaissance physicians, lay medical practitioners, and elite and common readers who so frequently consulted them. Early modern ecocritics will want to read this book along with book historians, historians of science, and those interested in Renaissance literature and culture.' Valerie Wayne, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa
