Tiffany Jo Werth, "The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton" (Oxford UP, 2024)
About this episode
Dr. Tiffany Jo Werth discusses her book on the role of stones and minerals in early modern England's religious and cultural systems.
The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Tiffany Jo Werth explores how stones, rocks, and the broader mineral realm play a vital role in early modern England's religious and cultural systems, a role that, in turn, informs the period's poetic and visual imagination. The scale of the human lifespan and the gyre-like turns of England's long Reformation provide a conceptual framework for the various stony textual and visual archives this book studies. The texts and images participate in specifically English histories (literary, artistic, political, religious) although Continental influences are frequently in dialogue. The religious orbit encompasses the Christian rivalry with Jewish culture, touches on Christianity's tension with Islam, but most intently centers on the antagonism between Catholic and variants of Protestant and Reformed belief.The volume features canonical writers such as Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Wroth, Herbert, Milton and Pulter, but puts them in company with lesser-known religious polemicists, alchemists, anatomists, painters, mothers and stonemasons. Accordingly, the multimedia archive includes drama, lyric and prose as…
People in this episode
Guest: Tiffany Jo Werth
Topics covered
- early modern England
- religious systems
- cultural systems
- poetic imagination
- visual imagination
- literary history
- mineral realm
Keywords
- lithic imagination
- early modern England
- religion
- poetry
- visual arts
- cultural history
- mineral studies
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Oxford University Press
Books & works: The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton
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