Reading Green in Early Modern England

Prize: Winner of the British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize 2014 'Leah Knight's Reading Green in Early Modern England is fresh, energetic, and rich in historical detail without forfeiting lucidity or personal voice. Readers will learn, in eco-friendly but unpolemical terms, about how exterior nature entered interior design, about the salubrious functions of green light for the eyes and flowery air for the lungs, about dancing trees and inscribed trees, and about how all these traditions shaped the scientific and literary writings of the period.' Robert N. Watson, Neikirk Distinguished Professor of English, UCLA 'We may think that the virtues of being 'green'--as an attitude towards the world and a philosophical and political movement--are essentially metaphorical, but in Knight's wide-ranging and penetrating analysis we see just how literally the early moderns took all things green. For the senses of sight, smell and hearing and the intellectual activities of reading and writing (and their associated acts of naming and carving), Knight shows that the green world was a powerfully charged agent of individual and collective good. All explorers of early modern ideas about our relationship with the natural world are in Knight's debt for this meticulous and perceptive study.' Gabriel Egan, Professor of Shakespeare Studies and the author of Green Shakespeare and the forthcoming Shakespeare and Ecocritical Theory '... Knight connects seeing, breathing, painting, carving, and Early Modern literary culture. ... this detailed study will prove informative for those interested in Early Modern English concepts of the natural environment and human sensory perception. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, faculty, researchers.' Choice 'Knight has produced an experimental, original, and fascinating book whose underlying messages suggests all criticism bears a green imprint.' Review of English Studies '... quirky, well-informed and literary ... [The book] is full of matter: snippets of information which charm, interpretations of text or cultural habits which engage and inform...' Green Letters '[Leah Knight] adds to the growing compendium of environment-oriented literary research with a lucid and germane reading of multiple genre from the early modern period.' Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment '... ecocritics are precisely the audience most likely to read this book and to apply its insights. If Knight refrains from unraveling the ecocritical stakes of her invigorating study, one can bet that many readers of Reading Green will - like the vegetation animated by Orpheus - be quickened and stirred by her words to do exactly that.' Renaissance Quarterly '[This book] is ultimately an evocative study of how early modern culture lived, saw, and smelled greenly. Ecocritical and literary scholars will find her analyses lucid and convincing, and one of the strengths of this book is the ways in which it opens up new avenues for additional research into the animated and salubrious green world of early modern England.' British Society for Literature and Science