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"Addressing an imbalance in early modern studies, Bonnie Lander Johnson reveals how, through interest in popular plant cultures and beliefs - tree ballads, embroidery, pedagogical tales, almanacs - Shakespeare put illiterate culture in contact with questions usually deemed learned and elite: theology, politics, the military and medicine"--
List of contents
Introduction: theatre, nostalgia and the reformation of plants; Part I. Plants: Monarchs, signatures and the recuperation of the 'common': 1. Trees, kings, Christ: almanacs, ballads and the divinity of matter in Richard II; 2. Pansies, queens, midwives: fairy flowers, travellers' tales and domestic practice in a midsummer night's dream; Part II. Places: Domestic and civic: negotiating botanical cultures in the theatre: 3. The theatre as medical marketplace: poison, desire and cultures of diagnosis: Romeo and Juliet; 4. The theatre as bower: botanical tapestries, the passion of Christ and the book of nature in Cymbeline; Conclusion: the mulberry tree; Index.
About the author
Bonnie Lander Johnson is Fellow and Associate Professor at Downing College, Cambridge University. Her academic books include Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Blood Matters (2018) and The Cambridge Handbook of Literature and Plants (forthcoming). She also writes fiction and non-fiction about early modernity and our changing relationship to the natural world.
Summary
Addressing an imbalance in early modern studies, Bonnie Lander Johnson reveals how, through interest in popular plant cultures and beliefs – tree ballads, embroidery, pedagogical tales, almanacs – Shakespeare put illiterate culture in contact with questions usually deemed learned and elite: theology, politics, the military and medicine.
Foreword
Examining the long-overlooked illiterate arts, this is a rich study of practices surrounding plants and their role in Shakespeare's plays.
