Botanical Poetics: Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print

"Botanical Poetics explores the relationship between horticulture and reading practices in early modern England, demonstrating the importance of practical engagements with plants to the development of English literary culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Jessica Rosenberg reveals how early modern writers joined plant-thinking and book-thinking according to the shared capacities of grafts, slips, poems, and pages. Printed texts, Rosenberg contends, seemed loaded, at times, with a distinctly vegetable capacity for reuse and propagation, and early modern plant-thinking placed potential paths of segmentation, circulation, and reception at the core of what a text or a plant is"--